Silver
by somethingelseornotatall
Summary: Felicity needed a friend in Starling to talk to that's a woman, so I wrote her one. Plus, Olicity and meta-humans.


**Silver**

Snow swirled from the heavens with lazy abandon. It settled on her shoulders and pink hat with the same indifference it did to the cars along the street and the barren trees that lined the sidewalk. She did not feel the cold or notice the grey of the clouds.

Today had been a good day. She had been able to focus on work without the constant hum of distractions - or people potentially dying - for the first time in weeks. There was no one to track down, no one to do a search on, no bad guys that needed to learn the word fear. There was freedom, pure and simple, in getting to do the thing she loved most in the world for a solid nine hours without interruption. She understood computers. They were uncomplicated, even on their messiest days. They didn't try to kill people for greed or because they were psychotic; and they didn't admit they loved her, only to snatch the dream away. She had never met a computer she didn't like.

She smiled at the gloomy sky and inhaled the cold air happily. As if the world could read her mind and resented her for such contentment, her peace was put to an end only a second later. Her phone dinged with a message. It had been going off all day with work related questions, her mom, and updates from various news outlets, but the way her gut clenched at the sound told her that it had everything to do with her other job. Something had happened. She could sense it in the air.

She didn't wait to pick it up, though she was eager to pretend she hadn't heard it. Delaying in her world meant the difference between life and death. It meant a killer could potentially go free. She may have been eager to extend the peace, but she also liked her work. She liked helping people and making a difference in the city. She may have not been a superhero, she may not slip into a cat suit and punch people in the face, but she knew that the people who were in her life could not do it without her.

The text was simple, concise, typical Oliver. _Murder at the docks._

She immediately texted back the word that had been shared between them more often than not lately: _OKAY. _The word had turned into a sort of curse between them. It was their passive-aggressive way of saying that things were as far from okay between them as possible. Neither of them mentioned it, neither was interested in starting another conversation that would take them nowhere. It was just shared between them, a haunting reminder of what could have been.

He didn't say anything else, not that he would have had things been going well between them regardless - they never put details into their text messages - and she hurried to get to her car. She could have pulled up the information she needed on her phone, but it was pointless. She couldn't really help him and the others without her workstation in front of her. She wouldn't even want to try. Doing things half-assed was not her style.

Her heels clattered against the stone with more force as she turned around to face the parking garage underneath the building and increased her pace ever so slightly. She had planned on getting dinner at the Japanese restaurant on the corner, which she knew from experience had the best sushi in town, a treat for working so hard lately. Her stomach protested against her decision to turn back, but sushi would have to wait. Oliver certainly would not. She didn't want his impatience to get the better of him. She had learned to protect him from himself.

Despite the seriousness of the situation, her mind wandered as she got into her car and worked her way around the switchbacks of the parking garage. She focused on the new processors Ray had bought for her computers; she considered the code she had written to get around a tricky bit of glitch-y data that had been preventing them from moving forward on a product. Work was still humming in her mind happily, refusing to let her fall into the rut of worry and tension that had been haunting her.

It didn't hurt that, for the first time in weeks, a handsome man, with no emotional baggage or man-pain, had flirted with her like she actually deserved to be flirted with, after giving her a surprisingly nice kiss only a week ago. It wasn't the same as it was with Oliver, it would never be the same, but it still felt good to be wanted.

The fact that he was her boss was the only thing she really had to consider about the situation. It gave her pause and made her hold herself back when she would normally be eager to move forward; it was that and the obviousness of being in love with someone completely not willing to take their mutual love in the direction it needed to go for both of their sakes.

She cranked the music up in her car, humming along to the melody at first, then starting to sing as the chorus crashed over the small space of her car. Her low singing switched to a yell/sing mixture as she made a left turn out of the parking garage and into the swell of after-work traffic. Her lips maintained their focus on the song, while her mind kept up with the work she had to do tomorrow and the flirting Ray had directed her way.

Both were better ways to spend her time than feeling the strange mixture of excitement and dread she was used to feeling for the place she was headed and the person she would see when she got there.

When she reached Verdant, she was still in a good mood, something that took more effort than normal lately. She got out of her car humming the song she had been belting on the way over. She didn't look up at the cameras she had installed around the perimeter of the building. She was not ready to consider who might be watching her. It would sour her mood.

They alley was dark and littered with garbage. Her hums echoed off the graffiti-covered walls and merged with the sound of her heels hitting stone. As she approached the super-secret door that led directly into the lair, she went through a quick mental routine she had perfected. She cleared her thoughts of what wasn't important, the minutiae of a day spent worrying about the next wave of tech that could change lives, maybe even save lives, and focused on being efficient, practical, and everything The Arrow needed her to be.

The feeling she had been avoiding since receiving his text settled into her stomach, however. She hated that she was so excited to see him, even if it meant that looking into his eyes caused her pain. Every time she met his eyes, she saw his regret, his sadness, and saw her own sadness reflected in the depths of blue. The tragedy was that she was his and he was hers and he was the only thing standing between them and their love story.

For someone who had never read Shakespeare, he was awfully fond of falling into the bard's more ridiculous tropes.

She typed in the code and the door released with a rattle of metal. For a super-secret entrance, it was noisy. She marched through the door with her typical firmness and determination, willing herself not to search for him the second the door closed behind her.

Diggle was sitting on the edge of the table closest to the stairs when she walked in. His arms were crossed and he was staring at a monitor across from him. He was wearing his typical leather jacket over a black shirt and jeans. He looked casual, perfectly calm. Felicity had seen him rattled very few times. Her stomach stopped swimming with anticipation when she saw him. He always calmed her. Whether he spoke or not, his presence was enough.

"Hello, Digg," she said, shooting him a warm smile.

"Felicity," he greeted her, turning his head just enough to return her smile before returning his gaze to the monitor. She searched the room to be sure, but it was clear that he was alone.

"Why aren't you out with them?" Felicity asked, setting her bag on her desk and peeling away her jacket and hat. Underneath was a pencil skirt and billowy blouse she had picked up only last week.

"I have to pick up Sara in half an hour," he said.

"Ah," Felicity replied.

"Too, there's no one to hit yet."

"How about I fix that for you?" she asked.

His smile deepened and he pushed himself off the table. He stood gracefully, all coiled steel and control as she sat in the chair that was hers and hers alone and spun around to face her monitors.

"The body was found at the docks an hour ago. It's the second body to be found there in a week," Diggle said.

"I remember," Felicity said, starting to type as she pulled up the police reports on the last body that had been found there.

"But Lance doesn't think they're connected," Diggle added.

"Two bodies in the same place seem pretty connected to me," she pointed out.

"Yeah, except there was something off about the second body...something about the veins being silver."

"Yikes."

Felicity pushed on her desk and rolled slightly to another keyboard to run a search on what could turn a person's blood silver, then sashayed her way back to the center monitor. She ran a search on all of the video surveillance in the area around the docks, hoping the murderer was not as careful as they had been the first time. Or, if the murders were unrelated, that the second murderer was not as skilled at staying undetected. Too, she wanted to keep an eye on Roy and Oliver and scrub the footage if they needed her to do so. She had to be as careful with technology as Oliver was with the people he told his secret to, though she felt she was far more careful than he was on that front.

Several feeds popped up on her computer, as well as Oliver's and Roy's trackers. Habitually, she slipped her earwig into her ear.

"Never seen nothing like it..." Lance was saying.

"I'm here," Felicity said quietly when Lance paused for breath, knowing Oliver could hear.

Oliver didn't reply. She hadn't expected him to.

"Some kind of poison maybe? Or some super serum like those super soldiers had?" Lance continued.

"I'll look into it," Oliver replied.

"If it is someone experimenting on people again...We need to stop this now. This town can't handle another siege," Lance said.

Oliver didn't reply. He was very good at saying nothing. He was also very good at saying exactly what she needed to hear in any given situation, even if she didn't know it at the time. It was as frustrating as it was endearing. She didn't know if he had walked away from Lance or not. It didn't matter. She kept her eyes on the data and her mind focused on her task.

"Felicity..." There was her name again, spoken so softly, and the word was full of meaning. "What do you have?"

"I literally just sat down," Felicity replied irritably.

He didn't reply, merely waited.

"Okay," she said, realizing belatedly that the word was back. She gave herself a mental shake. "There are no known poisons that can turn a person all Silver Surfer. None that I can find on here, at least. And I'm scrubbing through the footage now. Once I have the dead person's name, I can do a search and figure out if any of his known associates are psychotic evil geniuses."

There was a sound on the other end of the transmission that sounded very close to a brief, low chuckle. She figured it was Roy listening in and ignored it.

"I will let you know when I know more," she added.

"Roy and I are going back to fifth," Oliver said.

This time, there was nothing inaudible about Roy's groan. He didn't say anything about his displeasure, as the groan said enough. They had spent the last two nights watching the building, trying to determine when the next deal for the leading Armenian mob family in Starling was going to go down. It was busy work that Roy did not like. Much like Diggle, he preferred hitting people to spying on them. Spying was definitely more Oliver's thing. Oliver had patience to rival stone.

Felicity smiled at Roy's dissatisfaction, but no one spoke of it. Banter and teasing was for when they weren't on a mission. They would talk about it later, when Roy was certain Oliver couldn't hear him.

Felicity kept her line open to Roy and Oliver, as she always did when they were on patrol and she was busy working through several situations at once. She kept an eye on the area around where they were stationed during their spying, making sure there was no surprises. The cops were preoccupied with a football game downtown. Patrols were fewer than normal.

She switched from one computer to the next every minute or so, the wheels on her chair creating a constant track of noise through the foundry, and her eyes remained glued to the screen.

"I'm going to head out," Diggle said, cutting through her search.

She looked over her shoulder. Diggle was standing in between the two computer tables, his stance wide and assertive, but his face held an amused smile.

"Kiss Sara for me," she said by way of a goodbye.

Diggle nodded once, and then turned on his heel. He was out of the building a minute later. She smiled to herself again, loving how serious he was about getting to spend time with his daughter, and refocused on her task.

"Aha!" she said as the computer on the far left beeped at her.

"What?" Oliver questioned quickly.

"File for the person killed just popped up. I guess Lance really wants you to solve this fast. Reading now."

Oliver didn't respond, letting her move through the information without interference. Her eyes raced over the facts. The man who had been killed was thirty-six, an engineer, had three children, and owned his own business. His name was Jacob Martin. He definitely did not seem like the type of man to get mixed up in strange poisonings and murders on the dock.

She checked his information against the man who had been killed last week at the docks. He had been eighteen, had been attending a local community college, and had absolutely zero ties to Martin. They didn't live in the same area, go to the same grocery stores or malls, didn't even drink at the same coffee shop.

Lance was right. It looked very likely that their murders were not linked. She didn't like that she had to push away the kid's murder because it wasn't nearly as freaky as Martin's, but it was clear that something strange was going on and that took precedence. She definitely did not want another super serum making its rounds in the city. She couldn't solve every murder; she didn't even know if she could solve one.

A flash of Sara lying on the table behind her, three arrows coming from her chest, sent a brief wave of pain through her chest. She could definitely not solve the murder that mattered most to her.

She bit her lip as she went through all of Martin's personal information and ran a crosscheck with all known associates. There were quite a few. As an engineer, he held contracts with several big businesses, including Palmer Technologies. Felicity sat up a little higher at the mention of her new employer. She didn't like the idea of the killer being linked to her sanctuary, even if only vaguely. She had to be sure the link didn't run deeper.

She focused on Martin's work for Palmer Technologies, but it quickly led to a dead end in Central City. Martin had worked for the company two years ago in the city, a contract job that had taken him out of Starling for seven months. He had helped oversee the remodeling of their corporate headquarters, along with several other projects while there. From everything she could see, he had been successful, well-liked, and gotten through the project with very little strife.

She searched his more current jobs and found he had been working on a contract for the city. It was the sort of boring work someone like him would have taken to pay the bills, but it was also incredibly useful to the people of the city. She couldn't understand anyone wanting to kill him for that, but then she didn't really understand anyone wanting to purposefully kill someone at all.

"Felicity..." Damn it if the quick thrill didn't go down her spine at him saying her name.

She jumped, realizing she had forgotten about her earwig.

"You're talking to yourself again," Oliver said. His voice wasn't irritable, as she knew it could be, but it was clearly a distraction to him for her to be talking.

"Stopping now," she promised. Not two seconds later, she spoke up again. "Uh-oh. Trouble headed your way. Looks like there's about to be a showdown between the Armenians and Triad. Might be a good idea..."

The twang of an arrow firing cut off her words. She touched her ear subconsciously as she watched the video feed. The Triad was not playing around. They boiled out of two oversized vans and a black car, automatic weapons in hand. More ammunition poked out of their jackets. They had come prepared for war.

"Take the south entrance," Oliver whispered to Roy.

"On it," Roy said, his pitched breathing filling her ears.

Despite not being in the action, Felicity's heart rate had picked up speed. While she had made the choice not to live her life for only the cave and a quick death, Oliver had not. All she could think about as she pictured him preparing to square off against two very violent crime families was of his words promising that his story only ended one way. She knew, deep down, that it was a lie, despite her fear. If Oliver was anything, he was a survivor. It went against his DNA to give up, even if he believed as much now. It was what she told herself as the first shots were fired and Oliver stopped giving Roy directions. Movement had taken precedence.

Her eyes remained fixed on the camera feeds that focused on the warehouse. She listened to every burst of gunfire, every scream, every twang of an arrow flying through the air and the sounds of large fists meeting supple flesh. She couldn't distinguish one grunt of pain from the other, and her trackers did not tell her if Roy and Oliver were alive. She felt herself standing anxiously as she listened to the chaos.

"Police have been called," she breathed into the microphone, wondering if they could hear over the violent sounds that took center stage to their night. "You have ten minutes," she added.

More grunting. Screams of pain. Sharp breathing.

"That's it," Oliver said calmly, as if he hadn't just infiltrated a building with forty armed men and women all looking to kill. "Head back to the bikes. I'll meet you there."

"Copy," Roy said quietly.

Felicity closed her eyes gratefully and silently sank back down into her chair. After a short pause, her fingers started flying across the keyboard again, doing everything her power to make sure their getaway was clean.

"What now?" Roy asked ten minutes later.

"That's enough for tonight," Oliver said. "Let's head back."

"What about patrol?" he asked.

"It's time for dinner," Oliver said. "And I need to get this to Felicity."

"Right," Roy said.

There was a brief pause, and then the roar of the motorcycles starting in tandem let her know they were headed home, to her. A few more checks on the videos showed her that the police had arrived at the warehouse, and their reports told her that Oliver and Roy had kept the situation from turning into a bloodbath. The police had quite a few arrests to make. At least it would keep the Armenians and the Triad occupied for a while. The longer the were off the streets, the better.

Twenty minutes later, the secret entrance was opened with an obnoxious groan of metal. The tension Felicity had been trying to ignore entered her shoulders almost immediately, and the flurry of excitement and dread had filled her once more. None of this could be seen on her face as she spun in her chair to face them.

"Good job!" she complimented them.

"We kept the mobsters from slaughtering each other. Yay!" Roy said dryly, stopping in front of her while Oliver passed her stoically, his eyebrows lifting only slightly at Roy's words.

"Think of it like you kept one family from gaining the upper hand on the streets so that they can, in turn, more efficiently torture innocent people," Felicity said.

"Yeah, that helps," Roy said after a moment's consideration.

"Thought it might," she murmured, turning in her chair again to face Oliver as he set his bow on its stand with thoughtful care. His hand lingered on the bow for a second before he pulled it away and dipped into his pocket. He pulled back with a vial of a silver concoction that made her the tiniest bit queasy. He shrugged off his quiver at the same time and set it on the ground. With careful, measured steps he came back around her desk and held the vial out to her. He was as close as he dared these days, their personal space having increased with the confession that he could not be with her.

"This is..." he began.

"Martin's blood," Felicity said. "I figured."

He held it out to her. She wrinkled her nose. "What do you want me to do with it that the police forensic scientists can't?"

"Find out what turned it silver," Oliver said. "It might lead us to our killer."

"You know I'm not a pathologist, right?" Felicity said. "I mean, if Barry were here..."

Oliver's eyes narrowed only slightly. Dangerous ground. She changed tactics.

"My point is that I might have to ask someone else to help me," she said.

"That is not a good idea," Oliver said.

She shrugged one shoulder and carefully adjusted her glasses. "I can do the most basic of tests...and I have a feeling that won't be good enough. I either take it to someone or we wait for the police."

"Which could take weeks," Oliver said, well aware that the scientists at the station were backlogged.

"Right," Felicity said.

"Do what you have to," he said. He shifted awkwardly and looked over her head. "I trust you."

She could only nod to that. "What happened at the warehouse?" she asked after a beat, wanting to move beyond the moment.

"Everybody lived," Oliver said. "Mostly."

Felicity was very impressed with her ability to keep from giving him the biggest eye roll in the history of eye rolls. She looked over her shoulder at Roy expectantly and he went into greater detail, explaining Oliver's moves to the slightest of nuisances, and proudly pointing out his own role in the fight. He wasn't bragging, merely being accurate, as he liked to say. She listened to him intently as Oliver stepped back around the computers towards the mats, going the way he had come.

She tried to keep her eyes on the monitors as Roy talked, but that was difficult in the next moment as Oliver, with his habitually deliberate movements, stripped off his jacket and walked over to the salmon ladder. He needed to work off the adrenaline of the fight. He would be at it for a while. It was the greatest distraction in the world. She wondered if he knew how much it affected her. She had an idea he did.

"I thought you wanted dinner?" Roy asked Oliver, finally moving past Felicity to hang his bow up.

Oliver grunted in response. Roy turned back to Felicity and caved into the desire to roll his eyes that she had so skillfully fought off. She gave him a secret smile only he could see, and her eyes darted back to Oliver, who was almost sizzling in the cold air around him, before landing back on her computer and finally back to the blood Oliver had collected from Martin.

"I'm starving," she admitted.

"Korean barbeque?" Roy asked.

"I was thinking sushi," Felicity said. "Glorious, wonderful, sushi..."

"I could go for sushi," Roy said.

"Good," Felicity said. Her eyes darted past Roy again to where Oliver was busy doing a million pull ups with sweaty, beautiful, heat-inducing precision. "Oliver?"

He paused mid pull-up, his biceps rippling with the effort to stay motionless. She wondered if he was showing off. It was impossible not to watch him in appreciation as he very slowly lowered himself back down and jumped the remaining distance to the ground.

"Yeah," he agreed shortly.

She knew it would take them some time to get cleaned up and changed. She refocused on her monitors, painfully aware of just how very attentive she was to her surroundings with shirtless Oliver in front of her, and tried to figure out the mystery of a man with blood turned to silver.

She fed Martin's ID picture into her database, wanting to track his movements over the past week, and then continued to dig into his known associates. She was pulled back to the present by the sound of a throat clearing behind her. She turned, her eyes foggy and still lost in the hunt. They cleared at the sight of Oliver and Roy, dressed in civilian clothes, looking at her with smiles tugging at her face. She adjusted her glasses again, giving them a tiny pop to slide them back up her nose and blinked several times.

"Dinner! Right," she said.

Their smiles grew and she carefully ignored the butterflies one of them brought to her stomach. She stood quickly and pulled her coat and hat on. Oliver's face twitched again with amusement as she let out a slightly huffy sigh, then he followed her to the super-secret door with Roy at his heels.

The restaurant they picked was not nearly as talked about as the one she had originally intended to eat at, but it was still spectacular. They sat in a darkened back corner where they could talk without being overheard, and where Oliver could see both exits clearly. He had all the appearance of calm as he sat across from her, but she knew his mind was working. It was always working - that was part of the problem. He was in his head more than he was out of it. He could just be.

She told Roy and Oliver everything she had found, including the link to Palmer Technologies. She could see him wishing to tie the murder to Ray, particularly after she received a text from him after the appetizers. She tried to hide his name from them when she got the message, but there was very little that escaped Oliver's attention.

The message was work related. Though she had explicitly stated she didn't want late-night emails, it hadn't stopped Ray from sending her ideas whenever they hit him. She had learned it was less about lack of boundaries and more about his optimism for making technology that changed lives. He loved his work; he loved life. That optimism was catching. She sent a quick reply, then focused on deflecting Oliver's attention back to the case.

"So the two murders probably aren't connected," she decided. "And I'm having trouble finding anything in Martin's background to suggest he was involved with shady people..."

"We'll wait and see where your scans...and the blood sample takes us," Oliver said.

Felicity nodded and cast about for a safe topic that didn't involve either her situation with Oliver or Roy's with Thea. Everything was a reminder, even her work with Ray. She wanted to talk about something else, anything else, but she realized the men in front of her were not willing or able to leave work behind them with her. At least one of them wasn't. It was their remaining connective thread. They both clung to it. So she kept talking, getting more details of the fight, passing conjectures around, and otherwise offering Oliver the only olive branch they had left between them.

After dinner, she immediately returned to her computers and Oliver returned to his exercises. The unspoken tension between them was palpable. Roy left thirty minutes later to continue patrol. He was as good at Oliver was at putting his emotions into his work. Felicity realized that maybe she wasn't so different.

Her scans were still running so she focused on trying to find anything she could on Sara's murder. It had become her default task. Nothing ever came of it, but she hated feeling like she was doing nothing. She hated herself for feeling like Sara's murder was the real one she wanted to solve. She didn't think it would make things better for her and Oliver, she was not that childish, but she knew it would bring him closure; it would also bring Diggle more time with his daughter. He had promised to stay until Sara's murderer was caught. She didn't know if he meant it, but if there was any chance he did, she would give him all the space he needed. He deserved his family; he deserved his happiness.

She sighed pensively at the thought and felt eyes on her. She knew it was Oliver. She didn't look up. She would only be met with a loaded stare that would make her feel twice as conflicted as she already did.

"Are you okay?" he asked softly, stopping on the opposite side of the table. She looked up cautiously. Sweat dripped down his forehead and torso. He gleamed in the light. His fists were clenching and unclenching with his adrenaline. She inwardly cringed. That damn word again.

Luckily, her computer picked that moment to beep at her. She would have kissed it had Oliver Queen not been staring at her with so much concern on his face.

"There you are!" she told the monitor. Oliver cocked his head to the side curiously and walked around the computer. She quickly hid proof of her search into Sara's killer and brought up the pictures of Martin.

"Man, he's a busy...man." Felicity shook her head at her poor word choice, but plowed on. "It's going to take me a while to get through all this."

"I can help," Oliver said.

"Then I might miss something," Felicity said. "It's better if you stay the arrow and me the bow."

She froze as she realized how that sounded.

"Not that I'm saying you are only good at arrowing people or that you are somehow a tool at my disposal..." She was digging herself in deeper. Perfect.

Oliver was smiling, his eyes lighting up mischievously. He nodded at her twice, as if to say he would remember her comment in the future and left her to sort through the footage.

It was ten o'clock when Oliver came back over to her. She had started a chart with timetables and repeating faces to keep things organized. She was beginning to see patterns. The patterns would lead her to the killer and whatever super serum was out there turning people silver. Oliver tapped twice on the table to get her attention.

"It's getting late," he said.

"Mhhmm?" she said, not catching his point.

"You have work tomorrow," he pointed out.

She sighed, this time from the knowledge that he was right. She didn't have the luxury of staying up all night. She wanted to make a difference, but there were only so many hours in the day. She blinked away the funk of staring at a computer monitor for so long and leaned back in her chair. She took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes, not caring that it would smear her makeup.

"Three kids," she whispered after a moment.

"What?" Oliver asked.

"He had three kids," she said.

"I know," Oliver said. She had already told him Martin's background.

She stretched out her aching back with a small arch and then searched the foundry for something that would take away the sadness at realizing the kids would forever be without their father. All she saw was darkened metal, steam, and a man who left her feeling conflicted and her heart sore.

"I should go," she said.

"Yeah," Oliver replied quietly.

"I'll let you know if I find anything tomorrow," she said.

He nodded once and turned back to the mats. She saw him contemplating going back out into the night. She knew he would. He always did. Living with Thea now meant very little against his urge to be moving, to be protecting the city. He would stay out as late as he saw necessary. She did not have the same desire.

"Goodnight," she said as she collected her bag and pulled her hat and coat back on.

"Night," he replied so softly she had trouble telling if he had spoken or the building had simply echoed her word back to her. She didn't tease him as she would have only a month ago. She simply turned and left, letting the screech of the door be proof of her departure.

She was awake far earlier than she wanted to be the next morning. Her habit of rising early came strictly from her work ethic. If she had it her way, she would sleep most of the day, which was what often happened on the weekends she had no work and no arrow business to manage. She was in severe sleep debt, but it was a price she was willing to pay to help save her city.

Her first thoughts as she bounced out of bed and shuffled sleepy-eyed to the kitchen for coffee and food was of the program she needed to fix. Her brain was back to code. It was her first love, and she couldn't pretend it away. It took her ten minutes of good coffee and food to warm her internal processors up enough to remember the murder of the previous night. She had tucked the blood sample into her purse and had brought it home with her. She hadn't known what else to do with it.

She went to her purse and pulled it out, looking at it curiously. It caught the light and sparkled. She was ashamed at the wayward thought that it was actually sort of pretty. She would have to spend most of her morning going through footage, if she time around the other details she had to manage at Palmer Tech. But she also knew that she needed the blood analyzed. She needed it quickly, or Oliver would get fidgety and do something that would force her to move without all of the knowledge that might be available to her otherwise.

She wrapped her hand around her coffee mug and brought it to her chest, letting the heat warm her and pulled out her tablet from under a cushion. She started to search for the best pathologists in the city. She knew that it wouldn't work to go to anyone associated with the police, and she definitely didn't want to go to the man who trolled underage women's profiles. She marked his name for Oliver to look into later and kept up her search.

She began to see a pattern; she always saw patterns. There was a user who appeared on various chat forums and web pages. The username was always the same: drbloodanddaises. It was clear very quickly that the person was brilliant, and good at what s/he did. They had skill that Felicity knew would come in handy. So she hacked the sites and tracked the user back to their IP.

The person was local and lived near downtown. She ran a search on the utilities and lease for the owner of the IP address and was pleased when it came back with a name: Heather Fox. Felicity researched her credentials next. She had two PhDs, written over fifteen academic papers, lent her services to the FBI and Interpol, and was one of the youngest forensic pathologists to ever graduate in the history of the United States. She was smart, driven. Felicity liked her already. The only problem was her connection to the FBI. Felicity couldn't be certain that she wouldn't run straight to the feds if she ever found out about Felicity's Arrow connection.

Still considering it, she got ready for the day, choosing a power dress that accentuated her curves and a pair of shoes that hurt her straight to her pinky toes but made her three inches taller. She pulled her hair back and applied her makeup last.

When she got to her office, after greeting all of the staff she saw along the way cheerfully, she pulled up drbloodanddaises posts again. It didn't take Felicity long to realize the doctor was not as pro-police as her record indicated. She merely had a love for justice, and she would rather things be done properly than by people with half her skill level. Felicity understood the thought process all too well. It was part of the reason she had joined Oliver's cause. Justice needed to be paid. And for those who didn't have a vigilante to make them feel loved, then unloved, then awkward around, though still wanted, and always as if she had a purpose as his partner, the FBI, police and Interpol were the next best options.

Her next problem was approaching Dr. Fox without looking like a complete idiot. All of the cover stories she concocted in her head sounded ridiculous. There was no way a woman of Dr. Fox's intellect would believe anything outside of the truth. But Felicity had to try, and she was not willing to risk the murder investigation to someone with far less skill.

The second she sent her completed code to her second-in-command to test on the operating system, she looked up Dr. Fox's schedule. She had an office not two blocks away. They were practically neighbors. She was working on a bombing case in Coast City. It was a big case, but at least she was in town. Felicity hoped the woman didn't mind her dropping in unannounced. She figured that Dr. Fox's fees would more than make up for the irritation.

After a busy morning spent with her work-work and not her Arrow-work that left her feeling contended but rushed, she hurried out of the building, knowing that lunch would have to wait until dinner.

Dr. Fox's office building was not the glass church to business most of the other buildings in the district were. It was a square, brick building with elegant scrollwork along the windows and roofline. It was tucked between an old, classic movie theater and a monstrous building of a law office. It was old, perhaps as old as the city. Felicity loved it instantly.

The interior hallway of the building was poorly lit, but the floors were bright white and gleamed in the snowy grey light that filtered through the windows. There was a large directory on the wall opposite the glass door and movement from the other offices in the building. She noticed a spa, a sandwich shop, a dentist and plenty of business aimed at making money. A forensic pathologist seemed out of place in such a setting, but Felicity knew she had come to the right place, despite there being nothing on the board to suggest Dr. Fox belonged to the building. She had been very thorough,

There was no elevator, so Felicity was forced to climb five stores on that polished, white staircase in her three-inch heels. She fancied herself in shape, but her calves were burning by the time she reached the last step on the staircase. She gently cursed the staircase and the people who had built it, and then focused on the doors. The top level had less doors and far fewer businesses. A private detective and an internet business were the only two offices outside of the pathology suite. Half of the floor belong to Dr. Fox and her staff.

Felicity went to a door that only read: ENTRANCE, and carefully pushed it open. Unlike the door at the foundry, this one did not groan and squeak. It swept the floor nearly soundlessly.

On the other side, there was a small waiting area that looked as if it did not get much use and more doors along the back wall. She could hear conversation to the left of the door, from offices further down the suite, and music coming from the room directly in front of her. She didn't know how far away the people who belonged to the voices were, but the music was decidedly close. She listened to it for a second, taking it in. It was soulful and sweet, not what she had been expecting from a pathology office at all.

She went to the door and knocked twice, hopeful she wasn't interrupting anything particularly urgent. There was a pause, and then the door flew open in front of her. The woman on the other side of the door was a contrast to every thought she'd had about Dr. Fox. She was shorter than she had seemed in her pictures, only five-foot-two at the most, had short brown hair that she had tossed back with the aid of bobby pins and a plastic cap, and had almond-shaped green eyes. Her smile was welcoming, if not a bit distracted.

"Did we have a meeting?" she asked Felicity after a short pause.

"No," Felicity said.

"Oh. Cool," Dr. Fox added.

She gestured Felicity into the room, where equipment and vials of what looked like skin and blood sat on the counters. The room was obviously clean, but it was far from the white, boring sterilization of all of Felicity's previous science classes.

Color was everywhere - in the posters along the wall, in the knickknacks that lined the top of the shelves, to the artwork to the machines themselves; they were covered in cheerful stickers. The song was louder on the opposite side of the door. It was something about romance and sticking around to the bitter end. Daises were tucked on the bookshelf in the corner. Felicity finally understood Dr. Fox's username.

"I don't like when people make appointments. It means they've had too long to think about what they need. They should just show up and tell me what they need without complicating it. It's better for everyone that way," Dr. Fox added as she sat down on a pink stool next to a clipboard, a purple folder, and a sample of what looked like hair.

"I'm glad you think so," Felicity said. "Though isn't it kind of inconvenient? What if you're out or..."

Dr. Fox was shrugging. "Then they either come back or go to someone else. I don't have time for what ifs. They are soooo freaking boring. What do you have for me?"

"Seriously?" Felicity asked. "That easy?"

"Don't let it freak you out," Dr. Fox suggested happily.

"I'll try," Felicity said with a smile. She reached into her purse and pulled out the vial. She held it out uncertainly, hoping she was doing the right thing.

Dr. Fox swiveled in her seat and leaned forward to get a better look. Her eyes widened, then narrowed. She gingerly plucked the vial from Felicity's hands and pulled it closer to inspect.

"Weird," she stated finally.

"Uh, yeah," Felicity agreed. "That's why I came to you. I heard you are the best."

The song switched to a faster paced one, one that Felicity thought she recognized from the eighties. It was another woman singing, but it was more a song of power than one of regret. Dr. Fox didn't seem to notice the change. Her green eyes were assessing the mystery Felicity had plopped into her lap.

"You're not wrong," Dr. Fox said. "Not to sound egotistical. Although, what's wrong with that, really? What's wrong with telling yourself that you're good at what you do? Taking pride in what you've managed to accomplish, and the fact that you haven't messed up so royally yet to get yourself killed. Nothing, that's what. I'm proud of what I've accomplished. Not gonna apologize for that."

Felicity smiled again. "I wouldn't want you to," she said.

"Good," Dr. Fox said.

She finally pulled her eyes away from the vial and seemed to take Felicity in for the first time. "Felicity Smoak?" she said after her surveillance was complete.

Felicity was surprised. "Yeah," she said.

"Vice President of Palmer Technologies," Dr. Fox added.

"That's what they tell me. Still can't believe it."

"Congratulations," Dr. Fox said. "You earned it. I read your senior thesis. It was brilliant."

"You read my..." Felicity shook her head. "You might be the only one to have read it. I don't know if my professors even really got through it."

"Don't be silly," Dr. Fox said dismissively. "Or be silly if you want, just don't pretend like that paper wasn't awesome."

Felicity was liking her more and more. She had an easy-going, anti-bullshit charm that Felicity was drawn to. She should have been offended or made uneasy by Dr. Fox's quirks, but all they did was make her feel like she wasn't at risk of sounding like an idiot. She felt welcome.

Felicity smiled again and focused on the vial. "I need whatever you can tell me as soon as possible. It's a bit of a...situation."

"An emergency, no doubt," Dr. Fox said. "Everyone is full of those." She gestured at the table. "Someone blew up a building. They tell me that's an emergency, too. They don't seem to understand that processing that much evidence doesn't happen over night. I've had my assistants working on it around the clock with me but it's still not enough."

"If you don't have time..." Felicity started to say.

"I have the time, I just don't have the time-time," Dr. Fox said.

Felicity chuckled. She felt herself relaxing, and she realized with a jolt that outside of Dr. Snow, she had not had a conversation with a brilliant woman of around her same age in a while...or really a woman in general. And Dr. Snow was too far away and too busy to be someone Felicity could talk to often. Felicity wondered when her life had become taken over by men. It was not a thought she got to dwell on.

"Tonight at the latest," Dr. Fox said. "Maybe later than what you think. I usually work until midnight, and then my assistant gets huffy and sends me to bed."

"Whatever it takes," Felicity said.

"On top of my regular fee, I want flowers, daises, to be precise," Dr. Fox said. "It's non-negotiable."

"Why daises?" Felicity asked curiously, wondering at the fixation.

"They're pretty," Dr. Fox added distantly, her attention being reabsorbed by the vial in front of her. She snapped out of it a second later and eyed Felicity with an interested smile. "Maybe when you have time you can show me around Palmer Technologies. I've always wanted to see what the future looks like."

"Oh! Sure," Felicity said, excited despite herself. "Any time."

"I probably won't make an appointment," Dr. Fox said.

"I get that impression," Felicity said.

Dr. Fox shrugged and nodded sarcastically. She flashed another toothy smile and then gestured down at her clipboard. "Tell me your number...I'll call you when I have something."

Felicity gave her the cell number, and the number for Palmer Tech, and said her goodbyes. Dr. Fox was just as cheerful and strange with her goodbye as she was with her hello.

When Felicity was in the hall again, she looked down at her phone and realized she still had forty minutes to find food. The meeting had gone far better than expected, and she could still eat lunch. The day was shaping up to be nearly as good as the previous one.

She picked up a sandwich from the small shop in the building, and then went to a nearby park, knowing she would never finish her meal if she took it back to the office with her. She would end up working. She always did.

She was halfway through her meal when a form she could have picked out in any crowd walked across her range of vision. His back was straight and his senses were aware. She was surprised that people didn't know who he was in his Arrow persona from his posture alone. She remembered too late that he lived near the park, and it made sense he would cut through it to run errands, or whatever made him appear so suddenly in front of her.

He caught her eyes a second after she noticed him. He adjusted his course, doing his funny head tilt again, and stopped directly in front of her.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," she replied. She saw the question in his eyes and decided not to make him ask it. "Went to take the blood sample to a pathologist. Got food on my way back."

"It's freezing out here," Oliver pointed out.

"If I go back to the office, I'll work," she replied.

"I think that is probably a better alternative to dying," he retorted.

Despite his protest, he sat next to her, his hands tucked into his coat. He seemed to melt into the bench, but the ease was all an act. His eyes kept moving, looking for assassins and snipers in the most ordinary of moments.

"I think I'll be the judge of that," she said, not harshly but not exactly flirting. It was a neutral statement, though she wished she could bring back the flirting. It had once been the highlight of her day.

"Have you found anything out about Martin that might help?" he asked after a short pause that was very close to being relaxed.

"Haven't had time," she replied. "Been busy."

"So busy you have to eat your food in the cold just to get a minute," he added.

She snapped her fingers playfully. "Exactly."

"That's probably my fault," he said.

"Believe it or not, Oliver, I do have a life outside of the..." She stopped when she realized what she was saying. She hadn't meant to go there, to throw that truth in the air between them and make the wounds sore when they were just starting to close. "Sorry," she apologized.

"For living?" he asked softly, though there was a definite undercurrent of irritation.

She shrugged and looked down at her food. She was no longer hungry. She balled the wrapper around the remaining sandwich and started searching for a trashcan.

"Don't," Oliver said, putting out his hand and catching her forearm. He let the touch linger and Felicity inhaled sharply. "Eat."

He stood and gave her an apologetic grin. He was gone before she could process that he had even really arrived. She looked down at her food again and realized she would need it before the day was over. She was in for another long one. She finished her meal, the cold pounding against her skin in a way it had not ten minutes ago. She threw away her trash and went to the nearest coffee shop. She ordered the tallest coffee she could find before returning to her office. She already had ten new messages on her desk and several technical questions that only she could answer.

An hour after lunch, Ray came to find her. He was grinning happily, his hands tucked casually into his pockets and his eyes bright. "You're brilliant."

"Hm?" Felicity replied noncommittally, uncertain of what he meant.

"Your calculations. Brilliant. I'm not surprised, though."

"I wouldn't go that far," Felicity said with a disbelieving chuckle.

"Which just makes you..." he hesitated, chewing over the word, "better."

Felicity laughed again, knowing that he was excited only because she had managed to fix his problem. He sometimes got carried away when he was on a tech high. She understood the emotion. It had happened to her more than once.

"What are you working on?" he asked after a short beat of silence. Though it felt loaded with things unsaid, it did not carry nearly the tension she shared with Oliver.

"I think the more efficient question is what am I not working on?" she asked.

"And that is?"

"I don't clean the floors or do accounting," she replied.

He laughed. "I will leave you alone, then."

"Thanks for dropping by to tell me I'm brilliant," she added.

"Any time," he said. "I'm actually on call for that sort of thing."

"I'll keep that in mind," she said.

He smiled and waved a goodbye in parting. Goodbyes were for people who didn't see each other so much during the day. She went back to work, multitasking like the badass she was. It took her until six that evening, around her other work, to find a face that appeared with Martin more than the others. It was a woman - a woman who was definitely not his wife. She met him at his coffee shop, at his work, and the last time was two days before his murder at his doctor's office. He looked harried each time he saw her.

Felicity thought of two options: it was an affair he was trying to get out of and she refused to let it go, or it was a shady deal gone bad. The woman definitely looked as if she were involved in business. Her suit was one she had seen online for thousands of dollars.

She put the woman's face into her program in the foundry, remote accessing it over her secure channel, and then sent Oliver a text of the woman's face with a brief note telling him what she had found.

His only reply was a brief and rather pointed: _K._

She shook her head when she saw his reply and then went back to working. She only looked up again when her assistant told her was time to go home. She nodded blearily and closed the folder she had been reading and left it on her keyboard to finish tomorrow.

She walked to her car alone, her thoughts divided on the code that just didn't seem to be working the way she wanted it to and Martin. The second she got into the foundry, she pushed off her heels and brought up the Facebook pages of his children. She spent thirty minutes stalking them all, feeling the sadness in the pit of her stomach grow with every upbeat post and message of love Martin left for his children. If it was an affair that got him killed, she couldn't see it. She couldn't believe it. It had to be something else, something they didn't have a name for yet.

She didn't hear him come in, but she certainly felt it when he was behind her. Even if she hadn't known him so well, had gotten used to the way he changed the very air in a room, the tension he brought with him belonged to them alone. She could have felt it blindfolded.

"It won't help," he said softly.

"No," she agreed, quickly closing out the pages and bringing up Martin's history to the screen again.

"Have you found anything out about the woman whose picture you sent me?" he asked.

"Oh. I forgot that I set that to search!" Felicity said, suddenly flustered, hoping he wouldn't know how poorly she felt she was managing her duties in that instant.

He didn't reply. He moved next to her chair and looked between the three monitors curiously. He was so close that she could reach out and touch his arm. She stifled the impulse, knowing it would only make man-pain Oliver return, and brought up the search.

"Amelia Carter," Felicity said. "Land developer, landlord and mega-rich realtor Titan."

"That's the connection," Oliver said.

"What did she want with an engineer?" Felicity asked.

"The more important question is why she wanted him dead and what lengths she went to in order to make him that way."

"Are you still thinking it's a magic drug?" Felicity asked.

"I'm beginning to think it was poison."

"Someone assassinated him?" she checked.

"I'll go ask Amelia Carter," Oliver said.

"Shouldn't you wait until a little later?" she asked. "And for Diggle and Roy?"

He glanced over at her impatiently and headed for his suit without replying. The glance told her his thoughts. He had been hooding up long before Roy, and he didn't need Diggle's permission to go after a bad guy, or girl in this case. Reading him so well might have been easier on Oliver, but it certainly did nothing for her irritation. She rolled her eyes at him, waiting until he was looking at her so he would see that she did not approve of his choice, and then refocused on the face of Amelia Carter. She looked evil. It made sense that she was the baddie. But how had she gotten silver directly into Martin's bloodstream?

She checked the police report, searching for the autopsy. She was astonished and a little bit baffled to see that Martin had absolutely no injuries on him. He didn't even have a puncture mark to suggest a recent injection. Nothing. By the time she finished looking, Oliver was in his Arrow outfit and the transformation was complete.

"Find her and talk me in," he said, his voice deeper with the hood over his head.

"Already on it," she said.

There was a pause as she hacked her way into the phone company's database.

"Right. She's at her house. Lives alone so that should make..."

Oliver was already pacing away from her. The door groaned and rattled as he left and she put her earwig in with only the gentlest shakes of her head.

"Honestly!" she added softly.

There was that low sound again, almost like a laugh but not quite. She was surprised. She had thought it had come from Roy. She smiled at the idea that she had made him laugh, then focused on getting the blueprint for Carter's house. She sent it to his work phone and pulled up satellite imagery so she could help watch his back.

"She's got some serious guards," Felicity told him as the roar of the wind kicked up in her ear. She knew he could still hear her. "I count...fifteen just on the outside. Can't see inside. She clearly has a reason to be paranoid. My guess...villainess-ness. Being bad feels good. God. Shutting up."

There was another rumble of sound. This time she didn't know if it was a laugh or a sigh of relief.

Felicity rubbed her forehead in irritation and turned to her phone. She picked it up and found Diggle's number. It was better to let him know what Oliver was doing than have to hear about it later. Oliver may have been confident he could handle so many, but he had not brought Diggle and Roy into the fighting so that he could ignore their help when he actually needed it. She wouldn't let him be stupid, even if it meant he yelled at her later.

"What's up?" Diggle asked by way of greeting.

"Oliver is one-man armying his way into a building to get to a woman who may or may not be the definition of evil," Felicity told him. "She has fifteen guards on the exterior and god knows how many inside."

"Damn it," Diggle swore.

"Felicity!" Oliver said sharply in her ear. "You didn't need to call him!"

"Yes, I did," she replied. "And you can't exactly stop me from there so..."

Oliver swore, though he didn't direct the words to her. He had more manners than that. She ignored him as Diggle said, "What'd you say?"

"Oliver is complaining," she provided.

"Tell him I'm on my way...and that he will be hearing about this," Diggle said.

"Call Roy for me?" Felicity asked.

"Yeah," Diggle replied, then the line went dead.

She tossed her phone next to her on the table and went back to surveying the satellite images. Oliver was silent and huffy. She knew he would talk to her in his Arrow voice later about it being his choice and his mission, and she would let him know that it wasn't just his choice anymore, that he had brought them all in, they would stare at each other, loaded looks would be shared, and then the fight would end in a draw. It had happened so often the surprise had been lost.

"Felicity...I need you to cut the power inside the house," Oliver said fifteen minutes later.

"Are Diggle and Roy there yet?" Felicity asked.

"They are now," Oliver said.

"We're here," Diggle said, his warm voice sounding off in her ear reassuringly.

"Good," she said.

"Cutting the power in 3...2...1." She pressed the enter button on her keyboard and the lights cut off, not only for the woman's house but all the houses on the street. It was better if there were no witnesses that could identify Team Arrow.

There was no command to move from Oliver. They all knew what they were doing and where they were needed most. They were quiet as they rushed across the grass. Felicity bit her nail as she watched their bright sparks appear on the satellite imaging, and followed them via their trackers. She watched and heard as Oliver reached the first guard. There was a grunt of pain from the man, then Oliver lowered him to the ground, his elbow around his throat. Roy and Diggle spread out in a triangle behind Oliver, providing cover and taking down anyone who strayed too close with choke holds or knock-out darts. They were quiet, though the guards certainly were not. They shouted at the each other to get the power restored and did not have the cohesion of a force that had been trained together in battle, as Oliver, Diggle, and Roy had.

The three men were at the door when the first gunshot was fired. They took immediate action as Felicity watched the screen with fierce determination to look after them.

"There are three more coming around the west side of the house, all armed. One guy is slinking up from the rear," she added.

The rapid fire of automatic weapons filled her ear. She saw the heat steaming from the shooters on her screen as the guards kept firing and reloading. There was a solid thwack! thwack! thwack! in return, as well as the deep grunting and explosive power of flesh hitting flesh that suggested her boys were in the middle of hand-to-hand combat. She had lost them in the chaos of the attack, but she knew they were still fighting, still alive.

"I'm inside," Oliver said.

"I can't see anything," Felicity told him. "I'm as blind as you are in there."

There was the sound of glass and wood breaking and another deep grunt from Oliver. "Which way is her office?" he asked.

Felicity looked at the blueprints she had kept up on the screen, having known that Oliver wouldn't look at them himself. He depended on for such things. "Left," she replied. "Last door in the hall."

There was another thud and a more aggressive scraping of flesh on flesh. Felicity flinched. She didn't know which of the three the sounds were coming from, but it sounded as if the fight had gotten more intense. They weren't just taking out guards, they were fighting for their lives. Someone inside the house had more skill than the others.

The chaos and grunts told her nothing. She watched the screen, kept tabs on the police scanners, and waited for someone to tell her what was going on. There were more screams, but nothing on the outside told her what was going on. Everyone was inside. Sirens wailed in the distance.

"You have five minutes before the cops are on you in force," she put out into the space between them, hoping someone heard.

There was a slam followed by wood creaking and groaning. The unmistakable sound of a bow being drawn filled her ears.

"Amelia Carter...You have failed this city!"

Two gunshots were followed by the release of an arrow. The shots stopped abruptly and a woman's voice sounded around the chaotic proof in Felicity's ear that Diggle and Roy still fighting. Another sharp twang of string as Oliver set another arrow into place.

"What do you want?" Carter asked angrily, clearly annoyed that all of her security hadn't been enough to save her from The Arrow.

"You had Jacob Martin killed. Tell me why!" Oliver demanded.

"This is about Martin?" she asked in surprise.

There was a pause in which Felicity could feel Oliver's anger. Carter did not believe Martin was worth the effort Oliver was going through. "Why?" he added, more menace in his voice than before.

"I didn't kill him!" she said. "Why on earth do you think I hired so many guards? It wasn't because of you."

She started coughing.

"It was..."

The coughing turned into strangled sobs and moans. She was fighting for air. The sound increased in her ear, letting her know that Oliver had caught her before she could fall.

"Felicity...an ambulance," Oliver said.

"One is already on the way," Felicity responded. She hesitated, wanting to help more, then decided that the only thing she could really do was offer them a warning. "You need to get out. The cops are almost there."

"Shit!" sounded through her ear, startling her. Diggle was brought back to her attention. Before she could ask him what he was cursing at, he spoke again, "It's just like that man at the docks..."

"Someone was after her," Oliver said.

'Was' had a note of finality to it that could only mean Carter was no longer alive.

"It's the reason for all the security," Oliver added.

"So whatever drug is doing this must take some time to affect people," Diggle said.

"Which means that Martin may not have been attacked at the docks," Oliver replied.

"But who could poison them without them being aware of it and immediately going to the hospital?" Diggle asked.

"These are all very interesting questions," Felicity interjected. "But you guys need to get Roy and get out. Now!"

"Go. I'll be right behind you," Oliver said.

She heard Diggle running through the halls, gently calling out Roy's new moniker: Arsenal. A groan of pain told her that Roy was alive but potentially injured. She was about to tell Diggle what she thought when he found Roy. He swore again and she heard fabric shift as Diggle picked him up. She was convinced Diggle could have bridal-carried Roy out of the house if he wanted to, without even breaking a sweat. He was in good hands. She trusted that he would make sure Roy got out alive.

She didn't hear anything else from Oliver. He was in silent mode. He would speak when he was clear of the house, or when he was back at the foundry. It depended on the day and his level of man-pain. She watched the screen as Diggle and Roy reached Diggle's car two blocks away and zoomed away from their most recent break-in. Oliver went out through the back, running at full speed as the cop cars careened to a stop on the street in front of the house. He was on his motorcycle in a matter of minutes and speeding back to base.

She exhaled sharply, her heart in her throat as she waited for them to return, and leaned back in her chair. She took her glasses off again and took a deep breath, closing her eyes to calm her racing heart and push out the fear. She had turned the moment into a science. She only needed a minute and a half at most to get herself under control and back to the level of calm her partners expected of her.

"Is Roy okay, Digg?" she asked Diggle when her breathing had returned to normal.

"Just a graze," Diggle said. "He'll be fine."

"It's nothing," Roy agreed, though it sounded as if he was saying it through clenched teeth.

Felicity immediately stood and went to the med table. She pulled out the pain killers, antiseptics, suture kit and gloves. There was an unspoken rule that Diggle took care of Roy's injuries and Felicity took care of Oliver's. Diggle would patch him up, and Roy would have a new scar to add to his growing list.

It could have been a lot worse.

Despite Diggle and Roy leaving the house first, Oliver was the first one through the door. He had angry face and looked eager to break someone. He pushed his bow into its holder with more force than necessary and then paced in front of her computers for a short second, his mind working overtime.

"What happened?" Felicity asked before he could maintain his tight control and act brusque with her by ordering her around.

"She started coughing and then her face just filled..." He held up his hand and waved it in front of his face. "I've never seen anything like it. It wasn't...It wasn't like any poison I have ever seen."

"Exposure to some kind of radiation...a slow acting poison...?" Felicity mused.

Oliver bit his lip and finally stilled in front of her. She didn't understand the look he was giving her. It was almost as if he was suddenly depending on her for something - a logical explanation, maybe? There was also a deep sadness she had noticed over the past week. It went deeper than anything she had seen in his eyes when his focus was on her. She wanted to ask him what it meant, but she knew it would get them nowhere.

"I grabbed her hard drive," Oliver said, pulling a square piece of hardware out of his quiver. "Maybe there's something there that could tell us what she was up to and why she and Martin turned silver."

Felicity nodded and took the hard drive from him and plugged it into her computer. She bit her lip at the amount of data she would have to shift through, but she didn't say anything to Oliver, who was back to staring at her as if he had a secret on the edge of his lips. A minute later, Diggle and Roy stumbled through the door together. Oliver helped Roy sit on the med table and shooed Diggle away when he tried to lift Roy's shirt. Diggle shrugged as Oliver went to work mending his apprentice and joined Felicity at the desk.

"Thanks for calling me," Diggle said quietly.

"Turns out it was the right call," she said just loud enough for Oliver to hear.

"It is always the right call," Diggle said.

"Though I'm sorry if you were with Lyla and Sara..." Felicity said, turning slightly to look up at him.

He waved one meaty hand nonchalantly and bent down to look at the data Felicity was mining through. "Oliver took her hard drive?" he questioned.

"Yeah," Felicity agreed.

"Anything yet?" he asked.

"I literally just plugged it in," she said. "Do you guys think I'm magic or something?"

"Yes," all three of them answered at the same time.

Felicity couldn't help the smile that washed over her face. Though it was annoying they expected her to be able to breeze through an entire computer's worth of information in seconds, it was nice they thought so highly of her.

"Looking," she promised Diggle.

He nodded trustingly and sat on the edge of the table. "Where'd you get with the blood sample?"

"I should have the results back tonight," she said.

"That's quick," Diggle said.

"That's what happens when you pay for results," Felicity.

"I'll reimburse you," Oliver said quietly.

Felicity ignored him and stared at the information she was sorting through eagerly. She was close to a breakthrough. She could feel it.

"What story did you tell the pathologist?" Diggle asked.

Felicity blinked several times at the memory of Dr. Fox in her office. She was startled at how easily the doctor had accepted the case. "I didn't," she replied honestly. "Dr. Fox didn't seem to really care."

"She didn't ask for a reason?" Diggle asked.

"No. She just wanted to solve the puzzle, I think," Felicity said. "Which I totally get. Unfinished things drive me up the wall..."

She bit her lip as she realized her words could be taken two ways, one way that belonged entirely to the man behind her, who was currently silently stitching up Roy. She decided not to even try to fix the slip of the tongue. She merely shook her head slightly, her eyes closing in irritation, and then refocused on her computers.

"She may ask for one when she gets the results," Diggle said. "You had better think of something. I recommend not going with, 'It's an energy drink.'"

"Yeah, no," Felicity agreed. "Don't worry about it. I'll think of something."

She glanced over her shoulder in time to see Oliver's smirk slip back into his normal stoic expression. She smiled as well at the memory. It had been so obvious, so stupid. But Dr. Fox had no reason to believe that Felicity was involved in crime fighting or anything other than needing information for a product for Palmer Tech...or whatever lie she would tell to make it all seem more palatable.

"Ow!" Roy complained from over her shoulder.

"Don't be such a baby," Oliver said. "It doesn't hurt that much."

"It's not the bullet...It's the way you're pile driving that needle into me," Roy said.

"Big baby," Oliver muttered as Roy glared daggers at him.

"This woman was into a lot of shady things," Felicity mused thoughtfully as she worked her way through the files. "I'm surprised you didn't arrow her sooner."

Diggle chuckled quietly, and Oliver chose to ignore her last sentence and focused on the first. "What kinds of things?"

"Skimming from contracting deals by trading the top dollar construction gear for the cheap kind. Not keeping things up to code and bribing people off...Oh!"

"What?" Oliver asked, laying aside the needle to look over her shoulder.

"Found him. Martin, I mean," Felicity said, expanding the file to look into it more. Her shoulders hunched as she read the information. She was disappointed, though she had learned long ago that people weren't always what they seemed to be. "Martin took a bribe," she said in a low voice. "To keep one of Carter's projects from being shut down."

"So this is obviously connected to that project," Diggle said.

Oliver nodded in agreement. Felicity could feel his eyes on her again. She wished she couldn't.

"Some high-rise in Central City called Fisk Tower," Felicity.

"Fisk Tower?" Diggle repeated.

"Yeah," Felicity said. "You know it?"

"Sounds familiar," Diggle said, raising one shoulder.

Felicity moved to her center computer and typed out the tower name as well as Central City.

"Oh!" she said after the search returned the results.

Diggle leaned over her left shoulder while Oliver leaned over her right. She felt warm and protected at their movement, which was lucky, as her stomach had twisted into knots. She clicked on the top result and read with great sadness as the article explained the fire that had claimed thirty-four lives. The tower had collapsed and the cleanup had taken months. Carter had managed to bribe enough people to keep her name from being dragged through the mud. She had gotten away with murder. So had Martin.

"It's about revenge," Oliver said, certain of where the clues had taken them.

They all understood revenge. Sara's murder was felt in every second, every silence that stretched out just a little too long. They wanted the person caught. Three years ago, Oliver would have killed the person responsible. Now, they just wanted answers. Apparently, the person who had killed Martin and Carter was only interested in the killing stage of revenge. It brought an emotional edge to the investigation.

"Someone connected to one of the thirty-four people who died is silvering people to death. Silver-killing? Murdilver? Hm." Felicity paused thoughtfully, searching for a better way to describe death by silver.

"Does seem like a lot of effort," Diggle said. "A gun is quicker. Even an arrow would work better than silver."

Oliver glanced at Diggle with narrowed eyes, but he didn't rise to the bait. He was still focused on the clue they had found. "That is a lot of names to go through," Oliver said.

"I can do it," Felicity said. "Just..." She fluttered her hands to signal she wanted space, and after a shared glance, they walked away from her. Roy sat on the other computer chair, gingerly pulling his red sweatshirt up his torso and stared at the ceiling. The music for the club hadn't started yet, but the video cameras told her Thea was upstairs. She did not miss the wistful expression on Roy's face.

"You can go if you need to," Felicity told him gently, not sparing him a full glance in her urge to find out everything she could about the tower falling.

"Oh...I should..."

"There's nothing else you can do here, and you need to keep your job," Felicity said. "I will call you when I know something."

"Right..." Roy said a bit awkwardly. He sighed and then headed for the stairs. Felicity was already drawn back into her computers by the time he reached the first step.

"Are we going to have a talk about you running off like that?" Diggle said from the mats where Oliver had started to do pushups.

"What's there to say?" Oliver asked. "I made a judgment call."

"I thought we were over those sorts of judgment calls," Diggle said. "This is two steps back, man. Is it because of...?" Diggle didn't finish, but she felt herself drawn to the question. It was enough to make her stop reading and focus on their conversation. A lot was not being said, which meant that there was a lot to learn.

Oliver stopped what he was doing and glared at Diggle.

"Man, I get it," Diggle said. "I really do. But running off half-cocked is no way to deal. It's dangerous...not just for you, but for everyone who has to chase your ass into the firefight."

Oliver had the good sense to look ashamed. He shot Felicity a quick, loaded look and then refocused on Diggle. "It won't happen again."

"Good," Diggle said. "Now, are you going to need me again tonight?"

Oliver and Diggle both looked to Felicity for an answer. She sighed.

"I don't think I can make it through all this tonight," Felicity admitted.

"Want me to get you something to eat before I go home?" Diggle asked.

"I'll get something later," Felicity said. "But thanks anyways."

He touched her shoulder in a goodbye and then followed Roy up the stairs. She glanced up at Oliver. He was standing on the mats and staring at the far wall. He rubbed his forefinger and thumb together anxiously. His eyes were a thousand miles away. She didn't want to interrupt his trance. She fixed her eyes back on the computer, but it just made her sad.

She sighed again, her thoughts on Jacob Martin.

"What's wrong?" Oliver asked.

She flinched only slightly when she saw that he was standing next to her. She hadn't heard him approach. She was used to it. The words came tumbling out of her mouth before she censored herself.

"He just seemed so...normal," Felicity said. "Is no one what they seem?"

"A lot of times, no," Oliver said.

"I know it's silly, it's just..." She shrugged unable to articulate her disappointment. She hated that she wanted to believe in someone who had obviously taken a bribe that had gotten thirty-four people killed, but she did. She had believed Martin to be a good person.

"You believe in people," Oliver said gently, putting his hand on her shoulder as Diggle had done. Unlike with Diggle, her stomach flipped pleasantly at Oliver's touch. "And Martin may have been pressured to take the bribe...His kids' lives may have been threatened. There are other options than the obvious."

"I appreciate the effort," Felicity said. "But it's pretty obvious that he was _not_ nice."

Oliver slowly pulled his hand off her shoulder and took a minute to think of something else to say. There was nothing left. Martin was not the innocent bystander Felicity had wanted him to be. They had to accept it as part of the truth of the case and focus on what they could do to stop the killer from hurting anyone else.

He yanked off his shirt with sudden energy and went to the salmon ladder and started working his way up the rungs. The rhythmic clatter was strangely calming, if not a bit distracting, and she went back to searching for clues. She wasn't aware of the food being placed in front of her, but she was aware when she took her first bite of pizza. She looked down in surprise at the taste, trying to figure out where the food had come from and how it had ended up in her hand.

From the opposite computer chair Oliver chuckled quietly. She grinned sheepishly and raised her pizza slightly in a thanks. He nodded once and went back to running his own search on the tower and the tragedy around his meal.

Dinner was over when her phone buzzed. Expecting it to be Ray with another idea he couldn't contain, she reached for it immediately. She was a bit surprised to see an unknown number and the message: _All done with the blood work. My office or yours?_ At the end of the message was a smiling daisy.

It took her a minute to remember the blood she had given to Dr. Fox. The past hours of her life had been wrapped in tragedy. She didn't know if the blood would bring them any closer to the identity of the person responsible, but she did know that it was a bad idea to ignore the clue.

"Dr. Fox," Felicity told Oliver, holding up her phone.

"What does she say?"

"She wants to meet," Felicity said.

"Can't she just send the information?" Oliver asked irritably.

"Maybe she can," Felicity replied. "But she also didn't have to get the results so quickly either."

"Why else would she want to meet unless to ask you questions you shouldn't answer?" he asked.

"Oliver...I will call you when I have the results," she said firmly, gathering her things.

He merely nodded and went back to idly staring at his computer. He was in pensive mode again. It was better than man-pain mode. She passed him silently, aware that he was no longer paying her attention.

In the alleyway, she decided that if she was going to face Dr. Fox's questions, she would do it in a place she felt comfortable in. She would bring the doctor to her office. She sent a quick text, telling the doctor when and where to meet her, and hurried to her car. Traffic had died down, so it was a quiet, easy ride back to her office. She parked on the mostly abandoned street behind a car older than Egypt and saw Dr. Fox standing in front of the glass doors that led into Palmer Technologies.

Felicity was a bit surprised by the doctor's change in appearance. She was no longer wearing her scrubs. Her boots were trendy and gorgeous, her jeans fitted and her blouse feminine and covered in tiny flowers. Her jacket was fitted and her hair framed her face. She did not look irritated by the wait or the cold. She was perfectly calm. Felicity had the strangest feeling that it would take a lot to piss Dr. Fox off. She just seemed...cheerful and content.

Felicity extended her hand out when she reached Dr. Fox and shook her hand eagerly, feeling as though she needed the cheerfulness more than ever.

"Thanks for working so quickly," Felicity said.

"No need to thank me," Dr. Fox said. "I should be thanking you, really."

"Oh?" Felicity asked, holding the door open for Dr. Fox to walk through.

"I love the strange cases."

"Oh..." Felicity said. Would the doctor wait to ask her questions when they were upstairs, or would they start immediately? Why hadn't she taken more time to think of a plausible story? With the attack on the house and her search on the tower, she had forgotten to focus on her alibi.

"Is this when I get my grand tour?" Dr. Fox asked.

"If you want," Felicity said.

"Mmmhmmm," Dr. Fox said, her eyes bright and eager.

Felicity took her around to the major tech departments, waxing eloquent on the projects she could talk about freely. Dr. Fox surprised her again by following along with her the entire time. She understood everything Felicity mentioned, and Felicity realized there was no need to censor her explanations. Dr. Fox was not a woman of narrow focus. Her PhDs may have been on the forensic side of things, but she was a fan of technology and had a decent knack for it. She was eager, bubbly even, as she asked about Felicity's work and the new projects in development. Felicity found herself gushing over her work to the woman as if she had literally given birth to them.

"But this baby right here will change the world," Felicity said. "It is going to revolutionize the way we store data."

"Ease of access and accountability?" Dr. Fox asked.

"No...power," Felicity said. "And space."

Dr. Fox laughed at Felicity's warmth and eagerness. They went into the specs that Felicity was allowed to tell an outsider, then moved on to the next piece of tech, which sent Felicity into a babbling, gushing spiral that Dr. Fox seemed willing to follow and more than capable of understanding despite the non-linear nature of it. Felicity noticed absently that Dr. Fox was very tactile. She reached and touched the tech, the computers, the desks. Her smile never wavered, and Felicity felt as if Dr. Fox could be thinking of three things at once and not lose the thread of their conversation.

"You're sort of a genius, huh?" Dr. Fox said as they finally walked out of the elevator and into Felicity's office.

"What does that even mean? Okay, yes, they can measure some levels of intelligence with the tests currently available, but they are totally geared toward..." Felicity trailed away. "I should probably just say thank you, right?"

Dr. Fox shrugged. "If you want. Didn't say it to get a thank you. It is fact, something I deal in on a daily basis, so you can trust me to know."

"I'm not the one with two PhDs," Felicity pointed out.

Dr. Fox winced.

"What? Did I say something wrong?" Felicity asked.

"Just not a fan of associating intelligence to education. My mother was a genius. Dropped out of school at ten...Still managed to run her own business successfully. My cousin is as stupid as a log and has a couple PhDs to his name."

"Right. Of course," Felicity said, chuckling as Dr. Fox shot her another cheerful grin.

Dr. Fox was out of her seat a second later. She moved to the floor-length windows and whistled appreciatively. "I hate these steel buildings...no grace to them, but that is some view."

"Still getting used to it," Felicity admitted.

"You certainly seem to deserve it," she replied.

Felicity blinked several times at the compliment. Dr. Fox was the first person to tell her she deserved the office since Ray. Oliver had been too busy avoiding her, and everyone else silently disapproved of her working for the man who had taken Oliver's company from him even though Oliver could have fought for it. She would have helped him, stood at his side. Instead, he had given up. And she had decided to take Ray up on the opportunity to do what she been born to do - change the world of technology one innovation at a time.

Dr. Fox didn't seem to want or care for a thank you. Felicity was getting the impression Dr. Fox said what was on her mind without a lot of censure - something she related to completely - and didn't focus on the compliment longer than it took to give it. Her mind seemed to be in constant motion. Dr. Fox was almost skipping as she happily took in the room and the decorations, touching the tech Felicity had set out on a table in front of her desk.

She caught Felicity watching her curiously and she frowned as if she were forgetting something. Her eyes lit up a second later. "Oh. Right. Your thing...the blood. We mustn't forget that!"

She dug around in her purse for a moment and pulled out two vials with blue tops and a folder. She handed Felicity the folder and set the vials on the desk. "I used what I needed, separated the rest and put them here. Didn't want you to think I had any funny ideas about keeping the blood to myself."

"No..." Felicity said, though she wondered why she hadn't considered that option before going to the doctor. She flushed at the lack of foresight and felt grateful the doctor was so honest.

Felicity flicked the file open and started reading, forgetting in an instant that Dr. Fox was strolling around the room. The doctor didn't mind. She continued to look around and hummed contentedly whenever she found something that suited her need to touch things.

"Am I reading this correctly?" Felicity asked, pointing down at the document and staring up at Dr. Fox.

"I dunno," Dr. Fox said. "Are you?"

"This is straight silver? Like before it's refined, or messed with, or anything?" Felicity asked.

"Well it's straight silver and it's straight blood. The two haven't mingled the way you would think they would when one is injected into the other. It's a case of oil and water, if you will. It's very curious."

"And do you have any theories as to how? Is it a poison? Or some kind of radiation? Or...something?" Felicity asked.

"Nope," Dr. Fox said. "No theories. I just know that the amount of silver in the body should not be possible with your average needle size injection. No poison or radiation would do that. No toxin I can think of, nothing really that makes sense. It's like his entire insides were dipped in silver..." She shrugged as she considered it for a moment. "Weird."

Weird was definitely the right word. Felicity couldn't understand how it was possible. It wasn't logical. It did not fit into the realm of simple. And what was weirder was that Dr. Fox didn't seem that perturbed by it.

"Yes," Felicity said.

"Oh, and I should mention that the silver contained DNA that did not match the blood."

Felicity stared at Dr. Fox for a second in surprise, then flipped through the file the woman had made for her and saw the DNA mapped out for her. DNA was a good place to start. It was strange, and definitely not what she had been expecting, but it was something. It would take a very quick search to find Jacob Martin's DNA and compare it to the DNA in the silver. If they weren't a match, it was possible, however unlikely, that the DNA could belong to the killer.

Felicity's fingers twitched with the urge to start her search, but she couldn't do that in front of Dr. Fox without giving away her reason for needing the blood tested. She would have to wait.

"I know that look," Dr. Fox said. "Itching to find the truth. That's my favorite look on my face, not that I see it too often, as I'm usually staring at something gruesome when I get it."

Felicity felt sheepish at being caught, but she smiled. "Just trying to understand."

"A noble cause," Dr. Fox said. "Do you need to understand tonight, or did you want to come with me to the bar down the street and sample their wine list?"

"On a Thursday night?" Felicity said.

"There's never a bad night for wine," Dr. Fox said.

"I really should get..." Felicity tried to make an excuse, but it sounded flat even to her.

She hadn't been out with a woman friend - a smart, funny, carefree one at that - in years. All of her friends were men, and half of them made her stomach do funny somersaults when they touched her on the shoulder or kissed her unexpectedly after taking back ten million dollar necklaces. And she suddenly felt as though Dr. Fox had all the potential to be a friend.

Dr. Fox found her chair again. She looked at Felicity empathetically. "Wine. And tech talk. Now. No refunds."

Felicity was tired and emotionally drained from a search that had gotten her nowhere, but she realized that Dr. Fox had a point. She needed a break. She needed the wine.

"Can I call you Heather?" Felicity asked her as she put the vial and the folder into her purse and gathered her keys. "Dr. Fox seems rather formal for drinking partners."

"As long as you never call me Foxy, I don't care what you call me."

"Perfect," she replied. "And you can never call me Smoakin' or any variation of the word."

"Deal," Heather said.

The babbled together for another two hours over wine and chocolate soufflés, sharing ideas on innovative tech that was coming out and tentatively hinting at the outliers of their lives. Felicity had a lot of secrets to keep, but she felt as if Heather wasn't particularly interested in knowing her secrets. The woman just wanted to talk to someone who could follow her thought process without having to explain every other word. She wanted someone who did not feel the need to dismiss her happiness and joy as stupidity or childishness, which Felicity definitely did not.

It was only when Felicity was home, mind buzzing pleasantly from sampling so many wines, that she realized she had forgotten to pay Heather for her work on the blood, and she had certainly forgotten the daises. She shrugged at the thought and kicked off her heels and changed into her pajamas. She washed her face lazily and brushed her teeth with all the sleepy vigor of someone who simply wanted to get into bed and stay unconscious for the next eight to nine hours.

She awoke to her phone buzzing. She groaned and pulled her pillow off her head enough to reach over and look at her phone. It was Oliver. It was past her normal time to wake up. She groaned again when she realized she was going to be late, and that her day would start with awkwardness from him, but she answered anyways.

"What did the doctor say?" Oliver asked.

"Lots of things," Felicity said.

"About the blood," he pressed.

"Normal people say hello," she said. "Normal people say good morning. Normal people do not wake me up to ask about blood."

"We're not normal," Oliver pointed out.

Felicity didn't reply. Her huffy silence managed to get the greeting nothing else could have from him.

"Good morning, Felicity," Oliver said, fixing his voice so that it was pleasant and measured.

"Morning, Oliver," she replied.

"How are you?" he asked.

"Yeah, you're right, we're not normal," she said, wincing.

"Yup," he agreed.

She explained what Heather had found, including the DNA and the search she planned on running. She would have information before lunch, she was certain of it. Oliver was pleased. Too much time had passed. The trail was growing cold. They couldn't let the killer gain any more of a head start. Felicity winced again at how many times she had shared the same thought about Sara's killer. The parallels were starting to work their way into her psyche. Maybe if she could catch Martin's killer, she could find Sara's. Maybe the situation was not as helpless as it seemed.

She was at the office thirty minutes later, her assistant waiting with a huge cup of coffee and a smile. She returned the smile and took the coffee eagerly. She saw a pile of messages on her desk and more work than she had time for in the day. She carefully ignored the pile, told her assistant she did not want to be bothered, flexed her fingers like the old typing pro she was, and went to work.

DNA was foolproof. She liked foolproof. It took her all of an hour to track down a name: Ryan Summers. He was not what Felicity had been expecting at all. She had prepared herself for a grief-stricken family member or spouse, maybe even a friend. She was not expecting the man who had helped build the towers to be the source of DNA in Martin's bloodstream. He was the contractor who willingly aided Carter in all of her shady builds. He had been her partner for over a decade. He had made a fortune.

And, now, apparently, he was killing people.

"Ryan Summers," Felicity said the second Oliver picked up his phone.

"Where is he?" Oliver asked, not nearly as irritated as Felicity had been at his lack of platitudes.

"He's staying in a house he owns at the edge of town," Felicity said. "I don't have to remind you to call Digg and Roy, do I?" she asked.

There was a pause. She wondered if he would lie to her. He normally didn't. That was one refreshing thing about Team Arrow - they shared things with one another. Only, the sharing between her and Oliver had lessened over the past month. The sharp pang at the thought was swift and just as swiftly set aside.

"I'll call them," he promised.

"Thank you," she said. "Do you need anything else?"

"I think we can manage from here," he replied.

"Let me know what you find out," she said.

"Always," he replied.

They hung up and Felicity felt a surge of satisfaction. They might not have understood how Ryan Summers was poisoning people, but they finally had a name. Oliver could finally hit someone. She smiled happily and remembered Heather. She had forgotten to pay her, had forgotten the flowers, and Heather was the reason they finally had a name.

She gathered her things and told her assistant she would be back soon. She stopped at the first flower shop she saw and bought the biggest vase of daises they had. She regretted her choice only when she reached the fourth floor in Heather's building and remembered her shoes. She was panting by the time she reached the final floor and was eager to lie down in the floor and sleep when she reached the office.

Heather was in the same room Felicity had met her in. She was pouring over the clues with exquisite concentration. The music was a modern power ballad that had Felicity moving in time to the beat unconsciously. She stopped when she realized what she was doing and held the flowers out to Heather.

Heather smiled. "Yay!"

She put the flowers on her bookshelf next to the smaller vase and turned to Felicity excitedly. "How's the head?"

"Still pounding, thank you very much," Felicity said.

"Totally worth it," Heather said.

Felicity nodded. "I forgot to write you a check," she added.

"Oh. Money. Good for bills," Heather said.

Felicity handed her the check. Heather didn't even look at it. She tucked it into her desk and cocked her head to the side curiously.

"You look like you're in a good mood. Tech work out the way you wanted it to?"

"I guess you could say that I made a breakthrough..." Felicity said.

"Awesome!" Heather replied.

"I can't actually stay long," Felicity said. "I have to get back to it. Just didn't want you to think that I had forgotten to pay you."

"I would have forgotten," Heather said with a shrug. "My assistant tells me that she takes advantage of me all the time because of how often I forget the little things."

"Maybe you should get a new assistant," Felicity said.

"And find one that lies to me about all the ways she takes advantage of me? Nah."

"Makes sense...sort of," Felicity replied.

"Last night was fun," Heather said. "We should repeat it whenever both of us are not busy saving the world."

Felicity started a bit at the last part of Heather's sentence, but carefully hid her embarrassment. Heather meant working at Palmer Tech and not for The Arrow. "Yes. Definitely."

"I warn you, it won't be planned," Heather said. "I'm not good with that."

"And I warn you that I am chronically busy," Felicity said.

"We'll figure it out," Heather said. "Genius friends are hard to come by, after all."

Felicity smiled at the word friends and nodded. She said goodbye and left Heather to her power ballads and her bombing to solve. Felicity realized on the second level of the stairs that Heather still hadn't asked her why she had a blood sample full of silver. For a woman who earned a living asking questions and analyzing the facts, Heather was doing a lot of not asking questions. It made Felicity paranoid, until she realized that it was Oliver's job to be paranoid. She had made a friend. She was proud of herself and the fact that she was moving on. She was living her life. She wasn't going to let her work with The Arrow keep her from hanging out with her first female friend in...ever. She would figure it out.

Palmer was in her office when she returned. He was running his hands over the computer parts curiously. Her stomach lurched only slightly, the ghostly feeling of his lips on hers reminding her that Oliver was not the only person she had unsaid things to deal with in the future.

"There you are!" he said. "We have a meeting."

"A meeting?" Felicity asked. She walked around her computer and looked at her schedule. "I don't have a meeting."

"It's last minute," he said.

"Of course it is," she replied.

"There's a Japanese company with this great idea of a gadget. It could decrease our energy timeline by six months," he said.

"You don't need me for that."

"The president of the company asked for you specifically. Apparently, he's a fan."

Felicity looked at the files on her desk and mentally went over all the work she needed to do. A meeting was not high on her priority list, but she could not say no to the energy project. It meant free energy for a lot of people. It was part of her job to manage the important things.

"At least we know the man has some common sense," Ray added, smiling at her.

She smiled back warmly, her cheeks flushing slightly with his words, and she pulled her purse back onto her shoulder. He immediately started talking about their more urgent projects, asking her opinion on them all, listening carefully as she spoke and otherwise making her feel as if he heard her and respected her opinion.

The meeting went well. The president was an older Japanese man. He treated Felicity as if she were the most amazing person he had ever talked to. He was sweet, charming, and very shrewd. He managed to sell the device for five percent more than Ray had planned on buying it for, all with a gentle smile on his face.

Felicity gently teased Ray for letting the man beat him, but Ray merely shrugged. He didn't see it as loss. He had gotten what he wanted. "Listen, Felicity," Ray begin as they walked away from the building to the waiting car.

Felicity glanced at him curiously. She was always ready to listen. His nervousness, though, had drawn her interest.

"I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings last week," he said. He stopped at the car door and turned to face her. His expression was gentle and supplicating. She saw sorrow in his eyes.

"My feelings?" Felicity asked awkwardly.

"Kissing you was...great. Better than great, but I didn't want to make this..."

"Weird?" Felicity asked.

"It is a bit weird now," he agreed.

"So you failed. Epically," she said.

"Darn," he replied. His eyes turned serious again. "I don't want to take it back, though. I meant it. It's just..."

"Complicated," Felicity said.

"Yeah," Ray said.

"I have some experience with that," she said.

"So what now?" Ray said.

Felicity considered her feelings on Oliver at the question, the fact that she wanted it to be him having this conversation with her instead of Ray. But Ray was good; he helped the city in his own way. He did not come with the baggage of a man determined to be miserable. Even if she knew Ray was a filler for Oliver, she was eager to see where it took her. Maybe it would dull the pain in her chest. Maybe it would make her forget the love that she felt in every moment for the man she could not have.

"Dinner?" Felicity asked. "Or a movie? That's what people do, right?"

"Huh..." His eyes went distant. "I wouldn't know."

"There's also a technology expo on Saturday at the convention center," Felicity said.

"Let's try that," Ray said eagerly.

Felicity nodded and then smiled. Ray returned the smile and they got into the car. The tension in the car had faded with their conversation. She was pleased. The stress had been wearing her out more than all of the long hours she put in at work.

She left the office late that night. She managed to catch up on more than she thought she would be able to at the beginning of the day. Her immediate thought on the outside of the building was of food and then the foundry. Oliver was the more pressing issue.

She called his personal phone to see what had been done about Summers. He didn't answer. He was out of the foundry. He never took his phone with him on missions and she knew better than to call his work phone and potentially distract him. She called Diggle next. He didn't answer either. It was actually a relief. Oliver hadn't gone solo, as she had feared he might.

She ended the call and decided to get food before going to the foundry. She tried to find something healthy, but ended up deciding that not-cake was as healthy as she was going to get. She took her food with her and walked into a very silent, very abandoned foundry.

She sat at her desk and brought her computers to life. They hummed and whirred pleasantly. Her research from the previous night popped up first. She didn't try to go through the rest of it. They would find their answers in Summers. He would tell them what they needed to know. She closed the screens out and focused on finding out where Oliver was. She brought up the tracking software and found him easily. He was with the rest of the team, and they were on the outskirts of town. They had tracked Summers down as expected.

She put her earwig in and jumped at the sound of swearing in her ear. "Ahg!" she said in surprise, letting them know she was there.

"Felicity!" Oliver barked. "He got away. Track him!"

"On it," she said.

She brought up every live feed that was close to the house, knowing that if he decided to go north or west, she would lose him. There were not as many cameras in the countryside, and the satellite she liked to hack had its limitations.

"Blue sedan, license plate TKR-2347," Oliver added.

Felicity didn't reply. Her eyes darted from one computer to the next as she worked to find the man before he slipped away.

"Felicity!" Oliver said impatiently.

"I am working on it!" she growled back.

There was a brief pause, in which she could feel his irritation.

"There. Headed south on Broadway. He's near the intersection to James St."

The roar of three motorcycles filled her ear and she saw the dots that belonged to their trackers race down the street. Oliver coordinated Diggle and Roy, so that Summers was blocked in and there was someone to take Oliver's place should he lose the car. The dots that were Diggle and Roy peeled away from Oliver obediently, and she watched breathlessly as Oliver closed in on his target.

Then she heard a high-pitched sound and she had to pull her earwig out with a wince. At the same time, the trackers disappeared on the computer and the video feed went dead.

"What the..."

She started trying to figure out what had gone wrong. The trackers and video feeds did not respond to her prodding. Nothing worked. She was blind and deaf. She could not help them, and they could not tell her what was wrong.

Ten minutes later, she was still trying to get the system back up. The door slammed opened and Oliver stormed into the foundry like a walking, sometimes talking, thundercloud. He passed her silently, his gloved hands gripping his bow tightly. She wondered if he could break it with a simple flinch of his fingers. It looked possible from the anger in his eyes.

"He got away..." Felicity said softly, recognizing the symptoms. "I don't know what happened. Everything went dead."

"EMP," Diggle said, following Oliver into the room. Roy was behind him. They were all covered in sweat and looked eager to beat the crap out of something or someone. They did not like losing. Their competitiveness did not just translate into beating each other up. Losing a bad guy settled hard on their shoulders.

"He had an EMP device?" Felicity asked. "What kind? Was it the new compact model that..." She trailed away as Oliver looked at her, lips pressed together, eyes warning her to stop talking. "Not important...I can find him. Just give me some time."

"We don't have time," Oliver said. "He could be killing someone right now."

"So it's definitely him?" Felicity asked. "Did he have the poison on him? How is he administering it?"

"Didn't see a poison," Oliver admitted. He looked at the others and they shook their heads. "But it's definitely him."

"Did you talk to him?" she asked. "Find out why?"

"He wants the people who built the towers to pay," Oliver said. "I think he's operating on a guilty conscience...trying to atone for his mistakes."

"By killing people," Roy added.

Felicity looked over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed. They all knew that Oliver had started his crusade with murder. Revenge wasn't always a clearly marked road; nor was guilt. Roy clamped his mouth shut and had the decency to look ashamed.

"Sorry, I didn't mean-" he tried to apologize to Oliver.

"He wants to make the people who were complicit in the tragedy suffer. Thinks that if he kills the guilty, he can wipe away his role in it," Oliver said.

"Which means that I need to track anyone else who was bought off by Carter," Felicity said.

"Exactly," Oliver said.

"I don't mean to sound callous here," Roy said. "But he doesn't really seem like that bad of a guy. He's trying to right a wrong..."

"With murder," Diggle said.

Oliver nodded.

"I know, but..." Roy sighed deeply. "Lines aren't as clear anymore."

Felicity knew he meant for himself. The police officer he had killed weighed on him heavily. Right and wrong were twisting in his head in a way they never had before.

"You know we can't let him continue," Oliver said, stepping around the table and putting a hand on Roy's shoulder. "This is our city. Our rules. No killing."

"Unless it's me," Roy said.

"It's not like that," Oliver said. "You didn't make the choice. Summers did."

Roy nodded in understanding and moved past Oliver to put his bow and quiver away. Diggle had crossed his arms and was staring at the far wall thoughtfully.

"I didn't see any kind of weapon on him," Diggle said.

"I noticed that," Oliver said.

"So how is he doing it?" Diggle said. "He's poisoning them somehow."

"The amount of silver in Martin and Carter suggests he would have to be carting around a large container of the stuff," Felicity said. "Something I think you guys would have noticed."

"He came from Central City," Oliver said slowly.

"Yes, we established that," Felicity said.

"Do we know anyone from there with abilities outside of the normal?" Oliver asked pointedly.

Felicity felt a blush starting in her chest, but she knew she had nothing to be ashamed of with Barry. There was nothing wrong with kissing a man who liked her, and the kiss had been more of a what could have been situation than a truly physical moment.

"You're not seriously considering...?" Diggle scoffed. "Man, that's crazy. There's no way-"

"Can you explain how he's doing it, then?" Oliver asked.

Diggle's lips twitched with sarcasm and doubt. His default was to treat the ridiculous with skepticism and humor. He couldn't believe that super powers were real, even after living through a super human siege of monumental proportions. He was a follower of the old adage of seeing is believing.

"I think we have enough on our plate without adding monsters to the equation," Diggle said. "Or jumping to conclusions. I mean, this is Starling. Things like that don't happen here."

"It's not like they put a super human proof wall around Central City," Felicity said. "They can leave any time they want to."

"And use their new powers to track down old colleagues for revenge," Oliver agreed.

"It would certainly save him money on bullets," Roy said dryly.

"I'm not saying I believe it," Diggle said, "but if it is true, how are we supposed to catch this guy? If he can use his mind, or whatever, to turn us silver, how can we stop him?"

"Werewolf?" Felicity asked.

Silenced settled around her. Oliver had cocked his head to the side in confusion.

"Never mind," she said. "Probably wouldn't work anyways. Werewolves hate silver."

Roy snorted and she grinned up at him. She refocused on Carter's files, searching for names that might lead her to Summer's next target. The others moved over to the mats as she worked, to blow of steam until they had a trail to follow. She realized idly that she practically ruled the foundry. It was her research, her word, that set them in motion. It made her feel strangely powerful. She grinned evilly before realizing that she would always be a benevolent dictator.

"Pick up the pace!" Oliver yelled over the sound of sticks hitting. Roy grunted in response and the tempo increased. The thump, thump, thump of sticks hitting flesh let her know that either Roy or Diggle had taken a few hits to the torso. No one complained. They were too macho for that.

"Keep practicing," Oliver said. "I need water."

She felt movement in front of her and her eyes were drawn up without thought to his torso. Her mind sighed lustfully, though she managed to keep her expression stoic. She was about to look back down when her eyes moved up instead. Sweat coated his torso, as it normally did when he worked out, and tiny rivulets ran down the side of his face. It wasn't the sweat that caught her attention. It was the fact that he had sudden bags under his eyes and a faint blue sheen to his skin.

"Oliver?" she questioned, jumping to her feet.

He cocked his head at her again, a question. He didn't understand her sudden alarm. She reached out and took his pulse without stopping to think about the consequences of the touch, and his frown deepened. In the next second, his legs gave out on him, surprising them both. He caught himself on the table and her hands grabbed his hips in an attempt to keep him upright. His muscles contracted with the effort, and she knew she was not helping that much. She wrapped his arm around her neck and tried to maneuver him to the chair. Only sheer force of will kept him upright long enough for them to make it. He blinked up at her blearily as she continued to take his pulse. It was racing.

"Uh-oh," she said. "Diggle!" she called then.

"I'm fine," he said. His eyes started to close in contrast to his statement.

"What?" Diggle said, appearing at the edge of her desk without a sound.

"Silver poisoning can turn the skin blue," Felicity said, gesturing at Oliver. "Did he touch Summers...or did Summers turn his bad voodoo on him?"

"They had a short fight," Diggle said. "Oliver was wearing his gloves, though."

Felicity knelt in front of him and turned Oliver's hands over to look at his hands and forearms. A small streak of blue stood out against his skin. It was a line no bigger than a needle, but she had no idea how much it took to kill. Super powers were not her thing.

"Double uh-oh," she said.

Diggle came around the table to look at Oliver's wrist and Roy asked them what was going on. Felicity explained quickly and Diggle pulled Felicity back slightly.

"Maybe we shouldn't touch him," he warned her. "Not without gloves."

"Right," she agreed after a second's hesitation, pulling her hands away from him.

"I'm fine," Oliver repeated stubbornly.

"I don't think his herbs will heal this," Diggle said. "Or else I would already be giving them to him."

"We have to do something," Felicity said, her adrenaline racing out of control.

"What?" Diggle asked.

"Um..."

Before she could think of a logical response, Oliver's body went limp and he started to twitch and jerk. Diggle pulled her back as she instinctively reached out to help him. She shrugged off his touch on her shoulder and ran to the med table and pulled out plastic gloves. She pulled them on and tossed a pair to Diggle. He struggled with them as she raced back over to Oliver. She pulled his eyelids back and checked his pulse again.

"It's racing!" she said. "He's going into shock."

"His body is trying to fight off the silver," Diggle said.

Roy gaped between Felicity, Diggle, and Oliver in surprise. He didn't know what to do. He was frozen. He had never seen Oliver hurt so seriously. He had not been around the last time he had been unconscious and on the med table.

"Help me move him!" Felicity said.

Diggle didn't hesitate, though she could sense him freaking out a bit about the idea of silver super powers and those powers transferring to him. He pulled Oliver to his feet and helped him onto the table. He hooked up the heart monitor as Felicity tried to figure out what to do. She saw only one option. She had to hope Heather would continue not to ask questions. She pulled her phone out of her bag.

"What are you doing?" Diggle asked her.

Felicity held up her finger to keep from asking her anymore questions and swiped her finger over Heather's number. Heather answered on the second ring.

"Hello?"

"Hi. It's Felicity. Smoak."

"Hey!" Heather said happily.

"So, hypothetically speaking, if someone had silver poisoning, how would you keep them from dying?" she asked, surprised at how calm her voice sounded. Oliver would have known she was upset, but no one else.

"Hypothetically, I would say that a transfusion _might_ do the trick...flush the infected blood out of the person's system and replace it with clean blood," Heather replied. "Though if you're talking the amount of silver that was in that blood sample you gave me, it might not do any good. Oil and water, remember?"

"Is that the only option?" Felicity asked, biting her lip as she watched Diggle hold down Oliver as he convulsed.

"As far as I know," Heather said. "But then I have PhD at the front of my name, not MD."

"Right," Felicity said.

"Anything else?" Heather asked.

"I think that covers it," Felicity said.

"Cool," Heather said. "Well...bye."

"Bye," Felicity said.

She hung up and pointed at Roy. "Go steal me a blood transfusion device."

"Where am I going to find one of those?" he demanded.

"Palmer Technologies, applied sciences division," she said. She hesitated regretfully. "I can't give you my badge, or they'll know I was involved."

"I can get in," Roy said.

"You'll need help," Diggle said.

Felicity nodded. "Go!" she urged them.

They grabbed their shirts and ran out of the building. She did the math in her head. Fifteen minutes there, twenty to thirty minutes to break in, fifteen minutes to return...Did Oliver have an hour? Did he even have thirty minutes?

"Hang on!" she urged him, not caring that he probably couldn't hear her. She continued to hold him down, keeping him from rolling off the table and little else. His muscles bulged and tensed under her hands, and the sweat continued to roll off him in waves. His body was fighting the process of silver turning to blood. His face had not lost its blue sheen, but it also hadn't grown any bluer. She decided to take comfort in that one fact. It was the only comfort she found in the moment.

It didn't take them an hour to return. It took them forty minutes. They came back through the door, holding the machine between them. They set it next to Oliver silently, their fear in their faces, and Diggle immediately went to work prepping Oliver. Felicity went to the machine and got it running. She was not an expert on medical equipment, but she knew enough to feel confident.

Five minutes later, Oliver was attached to the machine, his fresh blood hooked to it as well, and his convulsions had stopped.

"That's good, right?" Felicity asked.

"It's not bad," Diggle said.

"What now?" Roy asked.

Felicity inhaled deeply and considered what Oliver would want them to do. If it had been any of them on the table he would have made the hard call. The question was obvious: dwell on his safety or catch a killer?

"There's nothing we can do for him right now," Felicity said. "The machine has to do its work. If it's going to work...It'll work," she corrected. "So, we find Summers and kung-fu his ass."

"I like that plan," Roy said with a nod. "Let's hit him hard."

"I would avoid hitting," Diggle said, jerking his eyes to Oliver's face meaningfully.

Felicity sat at her computers as Roy replied. "An arrow, or three, in various parts of him won't kill him," he amended.

Diggle nodded, his dark eyes flashing with violence.

"There are too many people here," Felicity said in frustration as she eyed the file.

"How many?" Diggle asked.

"A dozen still living," Felicity said.

"How many in Sterling City?" Diggle asked.

"There's no guarantee that he's going to stay here," she said.

"Just..." Diggle waved at the computer.

"Two," she said.

"Perfect," Diggle said. He leaned closer. "Roy, you take one and I'll take the other. Summers is bound to show up at one of them."

Roy grabbed his bow and quiver and marched toward the back entrance.

"Keep your distance," Diggle said.

Roy nodded without turning and was gone.

"Are you going to be okay here?" Diggle asked her gently.

"Find him," Felicity said darkly.

Diggle paused, as if he wanted to reassure her that Oliver would be okay, and then the feeling of him faded. The door opening was the only proof that he had left. She calmly put her earwig in and listened as the motorcycles roared to life. She found the two remaining people tied to the tower and its fall in Starling and sent Diggle and Roy in opposite directions.

It took a lot of willpower not to turn around and stare at Oliver. She knew if she did, she would end up dividing her attention to the point that Roy and Diggle might suffer because of it. She knew how to focus. She knew what had to be done. She would not let someone get hurt because of her.

"Nothing," Roy said into her ear. "I don't see any sign of Summers..."

"Same here," Diggle said. "No...wait. It's him."

"Roy, Diggle has him. Get there...Now!" Felicity said.

The motorcycle roared to life, but Felicity knew that Roy wouldn't get to Diggle in time. They were too far away from one another. Diggle would never let Summers kill the man he was currently hunting. Sure enough, a second later Diggle spoke again.

"I'm going in," he said.

"Roy is on his way," she replied.

"Not enough time," Diggle said.

She didn't reply. She brought up the condos and sent a detailed readout of the building, including all of the exits, to his work phone. He took a minute to look over it, and then breathed a quiet, "Thanks," in her ear.

A metal door creaked open and then breathing filled her present as Diggle ran up a set of stairs on the south side of the building. Another set of stairs and a second door opened.

"Summers!" Diggle said. "Stop!"

Diggle swore and his breathing switched to the steady in and out of someone running. More stairs. Felicity's eyes moved from Diggle's tracker to Roy's frantically. Roy was eight minutes away. Summers could be long gone by then. Or Diggle could be poisoned and dead.

She felt herself holding her breath in anticipating of the coming moments.

"There's nowhere to go, Summers!" Diggle added two minutes later. Felicity listened to the wind blowing through the earwig for only a second before realizing they were outside, most likely on the roof. She quickly brought up the satellite.

"Where's the other one?" Summer's taunted Diggle. "Feeling a little blue?"

"I will shoot you if you take another step," Diggle warned him dangerously.

"Do you know what it's like to have this much lethality in your hands?" Summers asked. "Do you know how it feels?"

"I'm holding a gun," Diggle replied.

"That's child's play," Summers retorted.

"So, what, you think that gives you a right to kill people? To kill _her_?"

Oh. God. He had a hostage.

Felicity looked closer at the screen and saw that it wasn't just a hostage. It was a child. Her hand moved to her chest. She didn't see a way out of the situation that didn't end with Diggle killing Summers. Oliver would hate the outcome, blame himself for it, but Diggle was not Oliver. He was trained to take the shot if it meant saving a life. He believed in second chances up until the moment a civilian was put in harm's way. He didn't enjoy killing, but he did not have the ghost of a best friend haunting him whenever he pulled the trigger.

_Please don't kill him_, she found herself silently pleading with him.

"How's that work anyways?" Diggle asked.

Good. Get more information. It could help them cure Oliver. Delaying gave them more of a chance to win.

"Prolonged skin contact," Summers said. "Which means all I have to do is touch her cheek with this hand here for ten seconds and...as dead as your friend."

"I thought you were about avenging the lives lost in the tower?" Diggle asked. "How is this right? How is hurting her the answer?"

"You're going to stop me," Summers said. "I can't let you. I have to make them pay. I have to do whatever it takes."

"Look, man, I get it," Diggle said. "You made a mistake. You're just trying to right a wrong, trying to make the people responsible pay for the lives they are guilty of taking."

"Yes, that's it exactly," Summer's said.

"And it eats at you that you can't find them all. Their blood on your hands feels like the only way to let the pain go, but it's not the answer," Diggle said. He paused. "A friend of mine was murdered recently. I've been looking for the killer. Revenge has definitely been on my mind. I know how you feel. There have been some nights where all I want to do is find the person and put three in their head, but I know it's not right. It won't stop the pain. It won't keep me from feeling the guilt of not being there when she needed me."

Felicity listened in awe. She had not thought Diggle had felt so strongly about Sara's murder. He was worse than Oliver in some ways when it came to expressing his emotions. He was always there for them, a neutral point, a source of good advice and fairness. The deeper things were always kept locked away. She wondered how he could feel so much and not share it with them, but then again, he had Lyla.

There was a pause. "I just want to set it right," he said. "I have to set it right."

"And you can. I will help you. You just have to trust me," Diggle said.

There was another pause. Felicity held her breath again. What would Summer's decide? Could he put his bloodlust away? Would his guilt allow him to give the revenge up? Was the murder spree the only thing that was keeping him sane? Could he give that up and look inside himself? The thought had to terrify him.

"I'm sorry...I can't," Summers said, sounding a bit emotional but determined. "They have to pay. If I don't make them, no one will! I'm sorry."

Felicity clinched, expecting to hear the sound of gunfire. Instead, there was a sharp thunk, followed by a crack, a dull exclamation of pain, and, finally, a thud.

"What took you so long?" Diggle asked.

"Traffic," Roy deadpanned.

Felicity let out her breath and took off her glasses. She rubbed at her tired eyes and then remembered the sound of an arrow being fired. Had they been forced to kill him after all?

"Guys?" she asked as the sound of weeping filled her ear.

"Hey, it's okay," Diggle said gently. She heard a low grunt. He had picked the girl up. "Let's get you back to your mom, okay?"

The crying continued without a response.

"Take care of him," Diggle said.

"What do you want me to do with him?" Roy demanded.

"Stuff him somewhere secure," Diggle said.

"Touch him?" Roy asked.

"Don't be such a baby," Diggle said.

"I don't see you touching the guy that can turn your blood into silver!" Roy called back.

"Guys?" Felicity repeated.

"It's okay," Roy added, still sounding irritated. "I hit him in the shoulder, then knocked him out. He should sleep for a few hours."

"Good," she said.

"Good?" he questioned. "Diggle gets to play Captain Hero while I have to tote around a crazy guy whose skin - his skin, mind you - makes people turn into the Silver Surfer."

"Ha!" Felicity said. "I knew that was a good reference."

"Not helping," Roy said.

"Just don't touch him without your gloves on," Felicity said.

"Right. Thank you," he said sarcastically.

He grunted and she watched on the monitor as he hoisted him onto the line he had used to scale the building. He pitched him down it with a soft push, not caring if the man landed roughly. He followed a second later. She trusted he could manage stuffing him somewhere he couldn't cause problems, and knew that she had seen the last of Roy for the night. He would stand guard until the knew what to do with the man.

"I'll be there in fifteen," Diggle added a couple of minutes later.

Felicity pulled her earwig out and tossed it onto the table. She sighed and looked up at the ceiling happily. They had done it. They had solved the mystery, saved some lives, and managed to capture the bad guy - though she wasn't entirely certain Summers qualified - without any killing. Oliver would be pleased.

The thought sobered her. She spun in her chair and looked at him for the first time since the hunt for Summers had started. He was still sweating buckets, and his skin glistened in the light. She wanted to go to him, to take his hand and offer him comfort again. She didn't know if she had the right.

Her resolve tightened at the thought. While she might not have been able to have him the way she wanted to, she was still his friend. She still cared about him. She still loved him. Not touching him felt like the childish thing to do. It was something someone with less restraint over her emotions would do.

She rolled her chair over to him and took his hand. She was no longer afraid of the silver transferring to her. Summers was the source. It would not spread beyond him. His skin was unsurprisingly hot and clammy. She held onto him tightly. She thought about Summers and how his story seemed to tie into theirs. Revenge. Hate. Being consumed by something that seemed to erase boundaries. The regret. The guilt. The confusion. The hurt. The difference between them and Summers was Oliver. He had restraint. He had the fortitude to keep to his no-killing path and change the city in ways that went beyond violence.

If only he could learn that he didn't have to give up everything that mattered to Oliver Queen, the man, to do it.

"That guy was a nutjob," were Diggle's first words when he walked into the foundry. "I do _not_ like super powers. They seem to bring out the cuckoos."

"I don't think the crazy is restricted to them," Felicity pointed out, sitting a little straighter when she saw him.

He shrugged one shoulder, as if to say, "Whatever," and looked at Oliver. He searched for changes in his friend's face. There was nothing to be found in the glance. It would take hours if anything was going to happen. It was a slow process, and not something that would happen in an instant.

"What do you think we should do about Summers?" Diggle asked.

"I don't know," Felicity said. "I'm not an expert."

"But you've been to Central City...helped Barry with his thing."

"That guy didn't have super powers. He had a really, really big gun," Felicity said.

"Still..."

"I could call Barry. See what he normally does."

"I think that would be wise," Diggle said sardonically.

Felicity rolled her eyes at him and gently released Oliver's hand. She found her phone and called Barry, not expecting him to answer. He had to be busy zooming around, though if he needed to answer, it seemed like he would have all the time in the world because of his power.

"Hi, Felicity," Barry said eagerly when he picked up.

"Hi, Barry," she said warmly. "Are you busy?"

"Just stopped a mugging," Barry said casually.

"Is that a yes?" she asked.

"It's a no," he said.

"Great...So, we just had a bit of a run-in with one of yours," she said.

"One of mine?" he asked.

"You know, like you," she said.

"Meta-human," he said, understanding what she was getting at.

"Yeah," she said. "Can turn people's blood into silver."

"Not cool," he said.

"And really gross," she admitted.

"I bet," he said.

"What do you normally do with the bad guys you catch?" she asked.

"I have a prison," he said. "It's really awesome."

"A prison?" she exclaimed.

"Under the accelerator...or part of what's left of the accelerator."

"Oh, that makes sense," she said, seeing how that would work in a flash of understanding.

"Cisco thought so," he said.

"He's not a really evil guy...He's just not willing to set aside his vendetta," she said then.

She filled him in on the story, giving him details she would not have been able to give anyone else outside of their circle. He listened attentively and intelligently, two traits Felicity had always liked of Barry.

When she was done, there was a gentle pause. "I'll be there...in a flash," he said.

She groaned. "How many times have you used that joke?" she asked.

"None," he said in what she took to be a sheepish tone.

"Uh-huh," she said. She gave him the address she had tracked Roy to and they hung up with cheerful goodbyes.

Diggle had moved to the opposite computer chair, his elbows on his knees. He was staring at her curiously.

"Barry has a prison for meta-humans," she told him. "He's going to pick Summers up."

"Good. The less I have to think about it, the better," he said.

Felicity smiled at him and then looked at the clock. It was starting to get late.

"You should go home," she said.

Diggle gestured at Oliver with his chin and shook his head.

"Roy can stay with me when Summers is gone," she said. "And right now, I want to know that someone wonderful, someone who would never ever take a bribe, is with their child."

"You better stop there or I might blush," Diggle replied.

He searched the room, his eyes landing on Oliver's face again. He didn't seem eager to abandon him, and Felicity thought that he was weighing the severity of Oliver's condition against the fact that he would have other nights with Sara.

"Please?" Felicity asked.

Diggle nodded and stood slowly. At his full height, he was incredibly intimidating. Felicity had long since stopped noticing. He smiled at her, a bright, cheerful thing that made her think he was about to do something mischievous, and then left the foundry with a sleepy goodbye. She shrugged at his weirdness and looked at Oliver again. She sighed and spun in her chair, deciding to get more work out of the way instead of staring at his face while she waited to see if he was going to make it or not.

Ten minutes later, she was back to holding his hand, her tablet in the other as she worked.

It was near one o'clock when Roy returned. He immediately stripped off his gear and went to change. He sat on the other side of Oliver when he was clean and checked his heart monitor every thirty seconds or so to be sure there were no signs of his conditioning worsening. They talked, trying to keep the other awake and functioning, as much as enjoying each other's company.

By two o'clock, Felicity had fallen asleep with her head on the med table, her free hand clutching her tablet with a death grip and Roy had fallen asleep face first into the computer table.

The pain in her head and the hot flush of an impending migraine woke her up at seven. She sat up with a groan and rubbed at her temples painfully. Her first thought was of water and pain medicine. Her second thought was of the transfusion. She stood and checked the machine. It was done. She turned to Oliver and was relived to see that the color had returned to his face. He was no longer sweating bullets. In fact, he looked chilled.

She stood gingerly, testing her body before she moved again. She kicked off her heels to keep from making too much sound as she moved around and retrieved a blanket. She draped it around his body and then removed the tubing from his arm. She lifted his forearm to keep him from bleeding and then replaced the needle that had been in his arm with a patch of gauze and tape.

Her work finished, she found the pain medicine she had longed for and took it with a chug of water she had claimed from the mini-fridge. She kept her eyes closed against the glare of the fluorescent lights for two minutes or more, letting her body wake up and mitigate the pain in her head.

When she opened her eyes, Oliver was blinking his way out of sleep. She stepped closer to him swiftly and he turned his head to her. For a split second, there were no barriers, no loaded looks or painful reminders of everything she had lost in him. He looked at her sweetly, warmly. It was the same look they had shared when he had asked her to dinner, babbling his way through the invitation. Then, the ice returned, and with it, all the memories of his decision to push her away.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Poisoned by a meta-human," she said.

He frowned at the word.

"Poisoned by Summers. He brushed up against you, I think. Not enough to kill you, but enough for you to need a transfusion. You've been out all night."

He tried to rise, but she put her hand squarely on his chest, over his heart. She raised an eyebrow at him, a dare to disobey her. He was not so foolish, but he also sank back because a transfusion was not something anyone, not even a superhero, could brush off.

"It's okay," she told him. "Barry came and put him in a super prison."

"But...How?" Oliver pressed.

"Well, there was a kidnapping, some grrr, then twack, argh!, smack, gah!, and, finally, thud," she replied.

His frown deepened. His brain was obviously not up to full speed. Had it been, he would have glared at her for not telling him the real story. Now, he simply couldn't understand. It was as though she was speaking a different language.

"You have partners now," Felicity said gently. "Partners who have your back. You're not in this alone."

That caught his attention. He turned to look at her, eyes wide and face disbelieving. She didn't understand the reaction, but it didn't really matter. She had learned long ago not to ask for explanations. If he wanted to share, he did so of his own accord.

"Diggle and Roy," she added. "They are very capable superheroes in their own right..."

_And they manage to have lives outside of their work_, she wanted to add, but knew it wouldn't do any good.

He smiled what passed for a smile these days - sad and somehow sweet. "Right."

"I'm just glad you're okay," she said. There it was again. That word. Okay. Ugh.

He nodded slightly and turned to stare at the ceiling.

"You should probably get more sleep," she told him. "Take it easy. You do know what that word means, don't you?"

He shook his head in a no, teasing her. She rolled her eyes and looked down at yesterday's dress. She felt strange suddenly. It was the first time she had stayed in the foundry all night for him since their kiss. It was almost a return to what had been, except that everything was entirely different.

She glanced over at Roy. She took comfort in the idea that he was there. He would watch over Oliver.

"I have to get ready for work," she added, and Oliver's eyes flashed with brief hurt and anger, two things that had no place anywhere near such an innocuous statement. "Call me if you need anything. I mean it."

He didn't reply, but she knew he would. He always did.

She moved at half speed all day, her fingers not flying over her keyboard with nearly the amount of speed and precision she was used to; her brain was just as unwilling to cooperate. She fixed her attention on the monotonous things she had been avoiding, knowing it could deal with those sorts of things easier than they could the technical things. Her one source of comfort was that it was Friday. She had the next two days off. It was an island in the hazy storm of her exhaustion.

By the time work ended, she had only one destination in mind: home. She drove herself to her front door and went inside groggily. She collapsed on her bed without taking off her clothes, her face smushed into her pillow, and willed her brain to shut down and let her sleep.

Three hours, a change of clothes, and a sleeping pill later, it complied.

The next morning she awoke to the sound of her phone ringing. She grumbled, but figured it was Oliver. No one else called her in the mornings on Saturday. Even her mom had the decency to wait until noon.

"What?" she demanded.

"I woke you. I'm sorry. Although, to be fair, it's nearly ten o'clock. That's not a good defense. Still woke you. Are you there?"

Ray.

"Hi," she said, raising up a little to look at her clock and shade her eyes with her hand. She closed her eyes as she pushed away the fog. It only helped to make her aware that she had a date with Ray planned. The butterflies were instantaneous.

"I am so sorry to have to do this," Ray started.

"You're cancelling," she said.

"I don't want to, but there's a deal that's about to fall through in Germany...and it could mean we're put back a year on the Star City thing," he said.

"I understand," she said, startled at the swoop of relief that passed through her. She didn't know what the relief meant, but she wasn't awake enough, or curious enough, to figure out what it meant.

"I will make it up to you," he promised. "I meant what I said."

"I know," she said.

"I'll call you when I get back," he said.

"Mhmmm," she replied.

They said their goodbyes and Felicity hung up. She tossed her phone next to her on the bed and the flopped her upper body into her pillow. She sighed into the sheets and then tried to figure out what urge she wanted to listen to more - the need to pee or the need to go back to sleep. Her bladder won.

She promised herself a day in, with no distractions and no work. Her one concession was a call to Oliver, to see how he was doing. He was noticeably reticent to talk about his condition, expected, so she called Roy instead. Oliver was on the mend, healing faster than should be possible. Sometimes she thought he had superpowers too.

It was nearing dinnertime when her phone buzzed. It was a text message from Heather.

_What's another word for stress eater? I need to know for a friend._

_Kummerspeck. _Felicity sent the word back, wondering if Heather knew German.

_Huh..._

Felicity paused as she looked at the reply. She considered the past three days, the way the case had brought up her emotions on Sara, on Oliver, on Ray. She was not okay. She was so not okay, and she was tired of pretending. She needed someone in her life who wasn't emotionally distant, connected to her romantically, or had raised stoicism to an art form. Heather was happy. She needed happy.

_Need someone to watch you stress eat? I've heard that dinner is a perfect outlet for emotional trauma...and hunger, _Felicity said, wondering why she trusted Heather so much and the friendship felt so easy.

_How'd you know that I love for people to watch me stress eat?_

_Lucky guess, _Felicity replied. _Big Belly Burger. Forty minutes?_

_I warn you. It won't be pretty._

_They serve alcohol._

_Oh, you'll be fine then, _Heather replied.

Felicity chuckled and moved to change out of her pajamas and into a pair of jeans and sweater. She was not worried about dressing up or looking nice. It was the weekend, and she had the feeling it would be a few more days before Oliver called her in. Not that she dressed up for him. She dressed for herself, but her jeans were for her private moments. They were not for her working moments.

Heather was already in the corner booth by the window when Felicity arrived. She had a large helping of fries with gravy and cheese on top. She did not look the least bit self-conscious as she ate. She was enjoying herself, her typical smile in place. She smiled at Felicity as she sat down and pushed the fries closer to her.

"Want to tell me why you are stress eating?" Felicity asked, pulling off a fry and plopping it into her mouth. She groaned a little at the taste and immediately picked up another one.

"Stupid feds," Heather said. "Coming in and acting all grr! about things they don't even understand. If they would just leave me the hell alone..."

She launched into a spiel about the investigation, the idiots who were managing things, and then went into a tangent about her brother coming to town.

"I love him, I really do, but, god, if I don't want to strangle him to death with my bare hands every time I see him more than two days in a row," she added. "And I mean _violently_."

Felicity laughed, and Heather's eyes widened as she realized what she had said.

"I'm going to hell," she decided. "Or whatever thing you believe in."

"You'd probably have interesting company," Felicity said with a shrug.

"You're probably right," Heather agreed. She stopped talking long enough to take another bite of the bean burger she had ordered around telling Felicity about her day. She paused pensively. "How did your hypothetical go?" she asked finally.

"It went hypothetically well," Felicity replied nervously, wondering if this was the moment she ended the friendship. Two times hanging out would be all she got out of the friendship. Her secrets would demand it of her.

"Good," Heather said, looking pleased.

Felicity felt her curiosity surge. "You're not going to ask any questions?" she asked.

Heather frowned. "Why would I do that?"

"Most people would be curious if I brought them a sample of blood with silver intermingled with DNA."

"I figured it wasn't any of my business," Heather said.

Felicity arched an eyebrow at her. She didn't trust the reply. She was wondering if she could trust Heather's calm. She had lived in the world of secrets and superheroes too long to take people at face value, though everything in her body was telling her that Heather wasn't like that.

Heather chuckled at the look. "I'm a good people reader," she said. "It's a gift, right along being able to handle too much tequila and juggling fire."

"Not at the same time, I hope," Felicity murmured.

Heather shrugged as if to say she'd tried it in the past. She stayed on point though. "What my gut is telling me is that you are a good person, full of kindness and passion to help others. Whatever weirdness you have yourself wrapped in, is your business, until you make it mine, which I hope you won't. I trust that your actions are for a good reason. I don't need to know why or how. I really don't want you to tell me why. I just want you to give me the same benefit of the doubt if I ever come to you with weirdness."

"Do you have weirdness in your life often?" Felicity asked, wondering if weirdness was code for fighting crime and kicking ass with computer skills.

"I _am_ weirdness," Heather replied. "But I don't think you meant it that way...I've just learned that some questions are worth asking and some aren't. I don't need you to lie to me, and I'm not interested in complicating a friendship with digging into whatever it is you are up to. Brilliant people are often called on to serve in brilliant ways. If I ever sense evil genius in you, I'll be sure to let someone know, though."

"Same," Felicity said.

"Plus, and don't take this wrong way, but I really don't care what you're up to," she replied. "I like a mystery only pathologically speaking. I solve it with my science. End of story. Which brings me back to one other thing that idiot of a fed _conveniently_ forgot to tell me..."

They were still talking about the case when Heather glanced away from Felicity, her eyebrows lifted and then lowered. Felicity looked over her shoulder and saw Oliver. He went to the counter and leaned against it casually, obviously planning on takeout. He felt her eyes on him a second later. His lips twitched with a smile before his eyes moved to Heather. The warmth switched to cautious and he pushed away from the counter.

Heather had gone silent. Either she knew about Felicity's link to Oliver or she had sensed the tension in Felicity and was figuring it out. Either way, Felicity was awkward.

"Hey," Oliver said quietly.

"Hey," Felicity replied. There was a brief pause, in which Felicity dreaded making the introductions and having to hear Oliver's displeasure at making friends with someone she had involved in a case later, then Felicity gestured at Heather. "This is Dr. Heather Fox...a friend," she added firmly.

"Nice to meet you," Oliver said charmingly, holding out his hand.

"Pleasure," Heather said. "Was glad to hear you didn't die," she added without the wince Felicity would have felt afterwards had the words come out of her mouth.

"Thanks," Oliver said.

"Sure," Heather replied. She glanced between Felicity and Oliver curiously. "Do you want to join us?"

"No," Oliver and Felicity said at the same time.

"He's busy."

"I'm busy."

Felicity smiled awkwardly, and Oliver's tension fell away. They shared a warm moment only they understood. It was surprisingly sweet and human, and reminded her of the reasons she loved him so much. He finally gestured over his shoulder. "Just getting some takeout before going back to work."

"Work?" Felicity asked dangerously.

He shrugged, as if to say she couldn't stop him and that he didn't need her to come in, because it was just regular patrols and nothing serious. She wondered when his shrugs had started saying so much.

"Talk to you later?" he asked her, his hand finding its way to her shoulder.

"Yes," Felicity said, wondering if he meant he would call her to talk about her choice of friends. It would mean a fight - but this time, she would win.

He dropped his hand slowly, waved at them, picked up his food, paid, and was gone as quickly as he had come in.

"Two words for you: sexual tension," Heather said. "I think I'm feeling it by proxy now." She fanned her face as if she were burning up.

Felicity laughed. "That obvious?"

"Outer space probably talks about it, it's so obvious," Heather said. "He your...something?"

"It's complicated," Felicity said sadly. There was another thing she couldn't talk about with Heather. She couldn't explain Oliver's reticence to be with her without explaining why.

"It usually is," Heather said. "But I've got all night." She looked at her watch and corrected herself. "Actually, I've got an hour and half before I have to be back in the office to walk an idiot through data he can't understand."

She leaned forward and plucked another fry from the basket. Felicity watched the movement, feeling like the tension was exploding outwards and the longer she kept it inside, the more it would destroy her. She needed to say something, she needed to let it out. It was burying her. And she could keep the darker things to herself. What mattered was the emotion, and there was no secret how Oliver made her feel.

She explained that Oliver loved her but wouldn't commit, explained how she was trying to move on with Ray, told her that it didn't feel the same, explained the limbo they were in as the tried to be friends, and otherwise spilled her heart out to a woman she only just met.

Heather took in every word, every beat of emotion with the same patience Felicity had taken in her complaints. She was attentive, sympathetic, and, most of all, non-judgmental. She didn't offer advice or try to soothe Felicity's emotions with meaningless platitudes. She listened and she cared, and for Felicity, that was enough.

Sara was gone. Oliver was fading, but Heather was normal, human, not bent by years of torture and pain. She was happy, and Felicity clung to that pure emotion eagerly.

For the first time in forever, she felt normal. And while it didn't solve all of her problems, it certainly helped her feel like not everything had to have an answer in the now. She didn't feel like she was drowning in a sea of negativity and the truth of the one person she wanted in the world not wanting her back.

When she left the diner to go home, and Heather went back to her office, she felt lighter than she had in weeks.


End file.
